#174 Exploring the edge of Taipei

Transcript

Alright, I'm just exploring around, randomly, east of the Shiman neighborhood where my Airbnb is.

Basically, just kept going east, found a cool park, kept going east. There's two movie theaters right by my Airbnb, and I went far enough to find another movie theater, so that's an idea of how far I walked.

Not crazy long, but long enough, for a new movie theater. And far enough that there are like mountains that are popping up that I'm curious about, but it was getting dark fast, so it's like era. No mountains tonight. I can't even see them on the horizon if I am close enough. But I saw Linjiang Night Market, L-I-N-G-I-A-N-G. As like, hey, it's night. I'm near there. I'll just go there. So I guess that's where I am now. Seems alright. You know, it's a street. Got a bunch of businesses on it. It's raining a little bit. It's like that weird thing where I can't tell if the rain is helping to cool things down, or if it's making the humidity worse. Maybe both, somehow.

But yeah, if it does start raining, it looks like the red line on the train. It just goes... It looks like the red line on the train just goes right back to where I came from, so I might just do that. But as I was walking around, I saw that the brown line, it's an above ground train, and it goes a few more stops from here and just kind of stops at the foot of a mountain. I was just thinking, ah, cool, maybe that's a plan. You know, I just need a plan. It doesn't need to be much of a plan. I just need something. Oh, here we go, and I'm at the official night market. Alright, I see.

So this splits off from the main street. The question is, do I go left or do I go right? Right seems busier. I'm going to go right.

Yeah, it just feels good to have a plan, because I, as I'm sure I said last episode, I'm just feeling a little bit adrift, because I've been walking around the Shiman neighborhood specifically a whole bunch. And then my next Airbnb is farther north, like in a distinctly different part of town.

So I'm not quite sure what to do in these last few days, where I'm still in this part of town, in the central part, I believe. I mean, I'm still trying to figure out geography of what anything actually is, even. So just a little bit of a plan, just like, ah, if I take that train and just get to this base of a mountain, I don't know, and we'll just see what happens. Maybe nothing, maybe I'll just be trapped at the base of a mountain, or maybe it'll lead to a whole fucking mountain adventure.

Just feels good to have a plan.

But, I guess the main reason why I didn't just wait till tomorrow to bring this up, is because I just wanted to mention this one dumb little thing, so I don't forget. Because I've never seen this in my life. As as I was walking toward here, a guy walked by me who had a bottle of water balanced perfectly on his head. Like a pretty big bottle of water, it was like 750 ml probably. So it was standing up on his head, mostly full of water. And yeah, he was walking at a good clip, and it was just perfectly balanced on his head. It reminded me, I don't know if it's even a thing that still happens, or was ever really a thing. But that cliche of going to beauty school, and how they teach you to walk on the runway, and part of that is to balance a book on your head. And just to walk with this, I guess, perfectly smooth cadence, so that the book doesn't fall off your head. So this was like that, except I think this would be harder. Because this thing was not a wide book, because this was a tall water bottle.

And this guy was, I don't know, I guess I would say confident. He was not worried that that water bottle was going to fall off his head. And yeah, you know, I made it, I stopped, and I turned, and I watched him for a bit. I just watched him walk. And it's weird, because I don't know, trying to unravel.

Why a person would do that, you know? I mean, obviously it's a skill. It's a balanced skill. It's some kind of, I don't know, maybe it's good for your walking. Maybe it's really, I don't know, makes you a smooth walker. But also, you gotta imagine that there's a certain amount of like, I don't know. I just like showing off in a weird way like a junior high school student might like, hey, I can do a thing. Look at my little trick I can do. I gotta know, it's weird. It is weird to just be walking around in public and being like, look what I can do. Pretty nice, right? Look at this fucking bottle balanced on my head. 5:00 Or maybe this is just the most self-actualized man in the world. And that slot never crossed his mind. And he's not trying to impress anybody. He just has a fully functional reason to want to balance a bottle of water on his head. But I've literally never seen someone do that in my entire life. And he, uh, he fucking nailed it, man. I guess that'd be the worst thing. If you start doing that and then you fucking, the bottle falls off your head and you look like a dipshit. That would be the worst of all worlds. So I guess if you're gonna do it, you gotta be good at it. This guy was fucking good at it.

Wow, this night market's really big. I'm still going. I'm still walking. Tons of little booths and stalls and claw machines. So many claw machines.

The other thing I've been noticing, I guess it finally sunk in. It's kind of a neat thing. Is that, uh, even though Wi-Fi is quite prevalent around here, it's not too tricky to find Wi-Fi. But I guess it is a bit unpredictable.

And there are, uh, still telephone booths around. Quite a few of them here, actually. Trying to think in South Korea. I'm drawn a bit of a blank. I don't really remember if I saw telephone booths or not. In Japan, though, definitely. They're very, very memorable. These green booths. And in Canada, man, they are rare. I used to literally phone home when I lived in Toronto with a calling card and a pay phone. Before I finally taught my mom how to use a computer to speak to people.

And it got tougher and tougher and tougher, extremely rapidly, to find a pay phone. I haven't been back to Toronto since COVID. I got to assume that's probably the end of it. There's probably no more.

Payphones there. But the payphones here, they do have a phone part.

But they also have a little Wi-Fi label. As you can really tell, I'm out of the night market now. I'm just on to a street. But yeah, they also have a Wi-Fi thing. So it's like, yeah, that makes sense. Because if you're at the pay phone, obviously you want to get in touch with someone. You require your looking for communication. And there's a good chance that you probably have a smartphone, even if it's like mine and it's just not connected to anything. So I just think that's really cool. Like, why not? If you've got the telephone booths still around as part of the infrastructure, but they're really not relevant anymore. They're really not useful. Then yeah, why not? Why not make them little Wi-Fi stations? I think that's really really clever. That's good thinking.

But all right, now that I got a plan, let's just fade out and fade back in as I try to enact this plan. But it ain't going to happen tonight because it's dark as hell. Let's fade back in on a future day when it's daytime.

All right, it's the next day. I'm heading to the subway. Just going to go ahead to the end. I'm going to go to the hospital stop on the red line, which is one past main station that has all the anime and video games. And then one beyond that is the big memorial for the former leader. So I'm starting to piece together this neighborhood a little. I'm starting to know how things connect and stuff. But from that, I'm going to go connect to the brown line and just go straight to the end. Because it's just an above-ground train that goes to a mountain. I did a quick little search. It looks like maybe it leads to a zoo. So I have no idea. Maybe this won't work out. But there's other stuff near there. There's like some kind of big cemetery. I don't know, it's just mountain-y shit. Sometimes you get to the edge of a mountain and you just can't go anywhere. You got to be in just the right spot. So who knows what will happen. But yeah, just random exploratory day. It feels like I got a lot of days left in this neighborhood. Even though it's only, I guess, two more. The third day from now, I'm leaving. But yeah, that balance of, should I stay or should I go? More and more and more. It's like, yeah, no. Get the heck out of here, man.

Last night when I was coming into this Airbnb. Again, I think the only reason it was even a question is just because this neighborhood is so cool. It is so cool to just walk out the door and be in she-men and just walk through it. 10:00 And it's just fun. It's just party time. It's like a little carnival every day.

Coming back home last night, it was super cool. Even now, there's just midday. It's a lot less busy, but it's still super cool.

I do like this neighborhood. And when I'm not just right here, you know. I might not deliberately make the journey. So that explains, I guess, why I came here. You know, it was like, oh, maybe I should stay at this Airbnb. Because the actual Airbnb. Nah. Last night, as I was coming in, I'm up on like the fourth floor. So I went up to the second, went up to the third, and I saw one of the cockroaches from hell. Which I've only seen cockroaches outside, and I haven't seen that many, but they are fucking enormous. Because like Jeju had a bunch, but they were different. They were like sea cockroaches, and they were little, and they were by the water, and they would just scatter away. Where these ones, man, yeah, it's like easily five times the size of like what a cockroach would look like in North America. It's like you're in dinosaur times. It's like cartoonishly big. It's like, how can this thing be that big? It's fucking crazy. And again, I'm not necessarily blaming the Airbnb. It's like, hey, whatever, man. I had to look it up. I'm not technically in the tropics. I'm in sub-tropical area, though. I think part of Taiwan, down south, does become tropical, but close enough. And in this climate, you just have giant cockroaches. It's just what happens. And it's just an old building, and it's just like, whatever, man. It's like whatever. It seems natural enough that a cockroach would be in there. But you know, the one cockroach you see is a signifier of who the fuck knows how many. And they're just so big. It's scary how big they are. Like, you know, the classic cats versus mice. Like, if you have a rat problem or a mouse problem, it doesn't hurt to have some cats around. And there is the house cat who lives in this house. And I was like, I wonder if that correlates here. I mean, this cockroach is not as big as a rat. And I guess not even as big as a mouse generally. But I mean, I have seen mice before that were about the same size if not smaller, you know. This cockroach is so big that it's comparable to a small mouse. So it makes me think like, does that cat fight the cockroaches? Like, is that cockroach big enough to be something that cat would battle? I don't know, but it's just like, once you see it, you can't stop thinking about it. You know, that's one of the worst parts. Like, even like whenever I get stuck somewhere that has bed bugs or something, the reality of what's happened is not that bad. It's the thought of it that is mentally draining.

And this is similar. Like, once you see the thing, then it's like your eyes are always looking for the next one. And there's this big opening under my door with light coming in from the hallway and it just kept expecting to see the horrible shadow.

Of a giant monstrous cockroach from hell coming through, it's just uncomfortable. And then I was saying how, you know, this place is already weird on many levels. You can't book it until 9 o'clock, weird rules about air conditioners and stuff. The other thing is that when I check out, I have to take pictures of this place to show that it's still in the same condition it was in when I left, you know, to show that I tidy it all up. And I mean, I always do that.

And it's as good of condition as I can, you know, as prepped for the next person as possible. I'm going to leave some garbage bags, I'm going to leave some toilet tissue that I bought some hand soap, just whatever. Just leave that all for the next person. Like that's just kind of generally what I do. But I've never had somebody, you know, that this is a requirement of checking out as you take the pictures.

This is a, I realized in Japan that that is part of the job if you work, flipping rooms, you know, you clean up the room for the Airbnb. And you take a picture, I heard people in Japan doing that. It's like, oh, I see, yeah, they're taking a picture just to show whoever runs the Airbnb. Like I did my job, I cleaned up the place or if there's a debate with a patron or something, I guess just to have a paper trail just to have proof. Like, now this thing was good, we cleaned it all up.

But why am I doing that? Why is that my job? Fucking weird man. Yeah, the more I think about it, the more evidence there is that I don't have any particular reason to stay there. It's just the neighborhood, the actual place itself. Not really anything.

No, I was just thinking about rose colored glasses stuff, you know, how even stuff in the recent past, when I think back to it, it's always like, ah, remember that. 15:00 But today while I was taking a shower, I was thinking back to when I got to Seoul, like when I'd been in Seoul for a bit and I was starting to explore, I hadn't gotten to Bukansen yet. But I'd found some smaller local mountains and some, you know, I'd be out in the outskirt neighborhoods and walking along like a cool little river and going up some mountains, some medium, small to medium mountains.

And I was just visualizing that image in my mind of like, oh yeah, you remember all those like super crowded residential neighborhoods with buildings piled up on buildings, but next to this river. But then also just the gray sky, the constant gray sky, the pollution everywhere, me having to wear a mask every day.

And I thought like, yeah, even though it's a weirdly interesting visual image to think back to that, it was a very unique visual. Would I want to be back there? Would I want to go back to that place?

And the answer was that no, no, no, no. It's so similarly to just having insects on your mind and cockroaches. Like that's sort of what the pollution was like. It just gets in your mind. It causes psychological damage, you know, I probably said this at the time, but it's like poison damage in a video game. It's like coming into sideways. It's a different type of affliction on a different axis. And it just makes everything so uncomfortable. Just like, whoa. But that was obviously the early days in South Korea. All the later stuff, I have much fond memories of. And I was thinking back to a cafe law. That thought came back to me or that taste of like, oh, I do miss that coffee. That was my favorite coffee in South Korea. A cafe law brand convenience store lattes. But I found a coffee that it's not the same. It didn't hit me the same way of like, oh, I love that. But I do kind of like it. It's the front runner just because I have no other front runner. It's good enough that it's at least a target, you know, it's something to look for in the convenience store. And something that when I see it, I'm like, oh, nice. There's that. It's called Bernachon Coffee, B-E-R-N-A-C-H-O-N. So it has Chinese characters on the bottle, of course, but it also has this weird European flair that kind of reminds me of Castlevania, like Symphony of the Night. The Bernachon emblem. The logo looks like an ancient medieval family crest. And whatever words are in English are this cool font that yeah, like it's like Castlevania font. But it's weird because like the F and the S are so similar that I think they're basically the same. Yeah, just the F and the S, the only difference is that the S doesn't have a little bar in the middle. So basically it looks like an F. Anyway, this thing, this fucking coffee, which is pretty tasty. There's a bunch of different kinds, but the dark blue bottle is my favorite. It says, I get used to Rome by myself and freely enjoy another world with my favorite coffee. So obviously the English is not quite right, but what it's meaning to say is, I'm used to roaming by myself and freely enjoy another world with my favorite coffee. Actually, I still don't know quite know what that means. I don't know. But I mean, it seems appropriate, right? I am roaming by myself and I'm freely enjoying another world with my, my by default favorite coffee. I don't know, it's just kind of cool. But these also, these come in a plastic bottle. They're like 35.1. So it's like, you know, $1.20 or something. Maybe closer to $1.50. But they do have some of this, this burnish on brand that come in glass, little glass bottles. And like they're very small little bottles, you know, it's like 250 milliliters probably. And I never bought the glass one because I don't know, it just seems so weird. So unnecessarily fancy, a little glass bottle for this teeny little sip of coffee that'll be gone in two seconds. But I guess now that I've nailed down that I actually like this brand. I get used to roam by myself and freely enjoy another world with my favorite coffee. It's just so weird and cool looking that I'm going to have to buy. I'm going to have to buy the glass one at some point just to try it out.

The gentle strumming of a park performer.

Oh yeah, this is the park with the hospital subway. Perfect.

A little bit overcast. I think it might even have just started raining on me. I still have not like, I just don't have anywhere to squeeze my umbrella. I'm not bringing my weather resistant jacket like I did when I walked around J.J. Because walking around J.J. I just needed to be prepared for all things. Here, it's like, hey, whatever. If the weather gets bad or it starts raining or something terrible happens, I'll just get on a fucking train or a bus or something.

But I am tempted and faint. I'm going to get fucked at some point.

But yeah, the other thing I guess that is cool too about being in this neighborhood. So when I was coming back last night, I saw some people doing a photo shoot. And that was kind of cool. Because they really were like set up well. They were across the street at the edge of Shimen where there's like a big multi-lane road that is like we're distinctly at the end of the entertainment park. But across the street from there is like LCD screens and you know lit up billboards and the cool like alright, this is anime town. It looks super awesome.

So this photo crew was across from there. What is this? This is like a water monument but you can walk out into the water.

Cool. Yeah, they were across from there.

Whoa, it's like a well in the middle. Nice. So yeah, this water from this little park pond is pouring down into a well in the middle.

So they were across the street and they were at one of these little areas where pretty rare around here. Everything's pretty square around here in general, but they were at a point where it was like a triangle, like the flat iron building. So they were all just set up at this triangle. So it was like a good place to be because there wasn't a lot of pedestrian traffic. It was actually kind of weird that I happened to pass by and I had to sort of skirt away around them. Yeah, they were at a point where there wasn't too many pedestrians. And if you use your wide angle lens, you know, you get that shot across the street of all the cool billboards and stuff. I was just some model lady in her flowing dress doing modeling stuff. And it kind of made me think like, man, modeling must be such a weird job because when you see it happening in real time, it's not very glamorous. Like it's definitely a job and it's also probably not. You know, I really doubt that lady felt like, oh, I'm so pretty. I'm so gorgeous. Everyone's paying attention to me. It's going to be these pictures. It really felt more like, oh, I hope these pictures are good. I hope I'm giving everybody what they need. I hope these turn out right. This is awkward. This is uncomfortable. I just got to do my posing in fucking public. You know, I just got to do it. Work as work, man. America's next top model season one, a classic Elise Soule. Remember that shit.

Yeah, it was kind of cool to just see and see in the photo shoot happen. But yeah, just seeing like you got the one person. But there's like eight or nine other people with lights and cameras and stuff all. I don't know. It seems stressful. Didn't seem like a fun job. Like even if I were a pretty lady, it's like, I don't know. I think you'd really have to convince me to do that shit to be a model.

Seems uncomfortable. And I guess I've watched other people too. Like Taylor R is the one I watch the most. She's this Canadian YouTuber who used to do Japan videos, but now she lives in China. And she used to be a model and just yeah, how cutthroat it is and how mean everyone is to each other. Just like the stress of it. And she had acne problems and just how super stressful that was of just having to deal with breakouts and stuff when your face is your business. Like yeah, I think I would prefer. Like yeah, I think it's a. It seems like a pretty, you know, I guess when I was a kid, I had that shallow take of like, I must be such an easy life. If you're just a pretty person, you're just a, oh, you're just a model. People just take pictures of you. But now that I'm an older man, now I can see the reality of like, nah, man, a job's a job, work is work. That's probably stressful as fuck.

Alright, I'm at the subway, so I'm going to go get on this bad boy.

Alright, I made a little mistake, but it could be for the best. So where I was supposed to transfer to the brown line was Dan station, D-A-A-N.

But it turns out right before Dan station is, wow, this is fucking unreadable, blue on black. Dan Park. So I saw the word Dan and I was like, alright, right on, that's where I get off. 25:00 And it looks like the actual neighborhood. It's D-A-A-Poster-F-E-A-N. So I don't know how that's pronounced. We'll just call it Dan.

But yeah, I didn't see any transfer to the brown line and then I saw the little local map and it's like, there's a park. I was like, this is none of this makes any goddamn sense. And then I realized, oh, I'm gonna stop early. So I was like, yeah, well, that's fine. Get off at Dan Park. Walk through Dan Park. Walking through it right now is pretty nice. If it has a drink machine, I'll be over the moon, but it doesn't really matter. They'll be plenty of convenience stores. And why this is kind of handy is like I was saying the end of the brown line. I used to a zoo and some kind of a bird park and a bunch of gondolas. I have a feeling it's a tourist village. It's like show up and pay for a ticket to some shit. Probably not just a wander up a mountain like I was, you know, kind of more in the market for. But I was just looking at nearby stuff. And there's this part that just based on Google Maps, it looks like a video game map. It's like, man, that's what I'm curious about. That's what I got to see. There's this one road that if you go by Google Road thickness, it's not the big thick highway one, but it's not the really thin little spidery, skinny, tiny street one. It's a mid-sized street and it just goes by itself. It weaves back and forth through this green area, like through a park presumably. And it gets to a cemetery and another cemetery. And then Foudi Kang Public Cemetery is the big one. And then if you keep going, Foudi Kang Environmental Restoration Park. Foudaq Columbarium Wing of Garden Tree. So cemetery stuff and some kind of weird cool park and possibly some kind of monument or something at the end. I don't know. I get the feeling that maybe it's going to be uphill because it is just this one road with nothing else connecting to it. I don't know, though.

Anyway, the entrance, the beginning of this type of thing, is, you know, like a 40-minute walk or something from here. So let's go try that because that just seems a lot neater. Once I saw it on the map, it's like, well, now I need to know. I need to know what that is. That's so interesting. So I'll loop around the Linjiang Night Market that I was at yesterday. Yeah, it actually looks like the beginning of this on Chengde Street starts on the brown line at Luizangli Station, but that literally would have been one stop on the brown line. So no biggie to walk it and now I'm walking through an ice park. It does not have drink machines, but I do have a bottle of water in my back pocket. That's one thing I just keep putting off. It's like, oh, buy like an Onigiri and some kind of little dessert thing and a couple of coffees. And then I eat all that stuff and I realize like, why didn't I buy a bottle of water? What the hell am I doing? It's a fucking heat wave. It's August in Taiwan. So I bought the smallest bottle because it is a little tricky. I just don't have the pockets in the space. I don't have room for an umbrella. I don't have anywhere to put all this stuff either.

So I did just get the smallest little 15-1 bottle of water because I can just put it in my back pocket.

It's really not enough water. I'm going to need a bigger bottle of water, but just as an emergency, just to have water in my back pocket at all times, just to have some level of water. I really got to, even though there's convenience stores everywhere, I got to not take this shit for granted. It's too dangerous. Too dangerous to not have water.

This actually reminds me a lot of Montreal, just something about this park. There was a park I was at last night, too. That honestly, I don't know if it was the same park it might have been, but some parker ads here.

Parks in the Dan neighborhood, they just have a Montreal-type feeling, which is a good feeling. Feels very nice. Very flat, but very open. A lot of trees, but they're very interspersed. Obviously, a lot more palm trees here than in Montreal, since Montreal has a grand total of fucking zero. There is actually like a biodome in Montreal, but no outdoor palm trees. Anyway, it's very nice, very pretty, very pretty little walk.

Constant beeping in the distance. 30:00 I've indeterminate origin, but that's just how it is in Taipei.

Alright, before leaving Daan Park, I hopped across the street to a 7-Eleven to grab a popsicle, and I found one of the fancy Bernachon coffees in the glass bottle. There's two different glass bottle kinds, but I can only find one. They also had another variety that was taller and was in like a cylinder. So I don't know what the fuck that is. I didn't catch the price of this, but just figuring back, counting back through my bill. I believe this was 45, and the normal one is 35. So this is the Golden Cup specialty coffee, premium from Bernachon. I mean, it's got the same basic cool design, but it doesn't have the cool English words that talk of speak of traveling alone and exploring another world with your favorite coffee. So that's actually kind of a bummer. I'm kind of here. I mean, the coffee's pretty good, but I'm kind of here for the cool flavor text, to be honest. That was an idea that I had actually years ago was microfiction on products. I thought it would be a cool thing. You could just write little teeny tiny two-centen stories and put them on bags of chips and drinks and stuff. I don't know. Just thought it'd be cool. I forgot about that idea, but I guess Bernachon kind of did that with that one product. Anyway, let's see. Let's see if an extra. I mean, I guess that adds up. That's like an extra 40 cents for this thing, 45 cents maybe. I always forget that I got to multiply by four, but then add a little bit. Add a little bit on top of that. Things are not actually especially cheap here in Taiwan. That was still funny. I mean, I see on YouTube all the time, all the time, so many Americans talking about how soft the yen is, and it's just so weird because it really lined up well with Canadian money. I didn't feel like I was getting some kind of amazing deal while I was in Japan. It's like, yeah, this is just basically the same as Canadian money. Lucky you, America. Lucky you. Nobody else is that rich. Yeah, fucks. Anyway, let's try this. Let's try this coffee. Oh, yeah, I was going to say the reason I stayed nearby the park is there's a bunch of garbage cans and recycle bins here in the park, but that does seem to be kind of how it is in Taipei is if you're in a neighborhood with garbage cans, there's tons. There's garbage cans everywhere. You'll never lack for a garbage can. Just from where I'm sitting, I can see a pair of garbage slash recycles. Both ways. There's a third one, all super close, but once you get into a neighborhood without garbage cans, then who knows, and it's still very up in the air about convenience stores, it seems like, you know, maybe 25% of them, if even, have garbage cans. A lot of them do not, for some strange reason. So I just thought that it's just more comfortable. Hang out in the park for a second, just so I can easily recycle this glass bottle. I don't have to carry it around with me. But all right, let's see.

Wow, that's unexpected. It tastes worse. It's okay, but it definitely doesn't taste better. Hmm, premium, eh? Premium with the glass bottle.

The aftertaste is kind of nice. That's kind of a nice bitter aftertaste. Yeah, no, there's like, I hesitate to use the term eggy, but that's just what comes to mind. It doesn't really taste like that, but that's just the image that comes to mind. That's a, I don't like that. Well, good enough. Don't have to worry about the glass bottle and the premium price. I like the plastic one better, but there's still the cylinder. I still have to test the cylinder at some point. See what that's all about. Anyway, there's the coffee update, and then I'll continue my adventure.

All right, just stopped in a family mart. Got some jazzy family mart music, 35:00 with this is the remix of also a guy on his phone. But I just thought I'd test out the drink in the cylinder. I don't even actually know. It might not be our Chen on brand. It looks similar though, but I don't see that specific name. And this is the same price. This is 35, just like the other plastic ones. Anyway, they had a latte, but I'm like, ah, right, well, latte, I know what that is. Then manned hellling, M-A-N-D-H-E-L-I-N-G, and it's like, hmm, maybe that's a type of T, because there is a shit ton of T in this country. So I was like, well, I already know what a latte is. So let's try this. So yeah, let's give it a go.

Tastes kind of like it might be a mocha. Pretty good anyway. That's pretty tasty. I like that. Don't quite know what it is, but I like it. On the way here too, I'm also, I'm on the street now that leads up to the cemetery. So it should just be straight on till morning. We'll see what happens. But I passed a burger king, and I haven't seen a burger king yet. But I remember in Seoul, walking around Seoul, kind of vaguely depressed. You know, everything was dirty and filthy and filled with pollution. And I remember the, ah, and I remember the burger king I went in. And, you know, I always have very, it's very touch-and-go with my debit card credit cards. So I remember trying it. Just like, ah, this might not work, but let's just give it a shot. And it worked. And I remember that led to, I mean, that led to me going to burger king like 50 times, at least, while I was in South Korea. I went to burger king. I don't know. Was it 50 times? It might have been. I mean, a lot of times. And I got to admit, it made me feel a little better, just like, ah, burger king, you know, fuck it. Instead of, you know, I mean, I talked about it at Nazim while I was there, but instead of striving to try new cultural experiences, I had the reverse feeling in South Korea where I was striving not to, I was striving to go back to North American shit. But it's kind of given me a fondness for burger king that I never had before. So I saw this burger king, and it wasn't really hungry, but I just wanted to test out my card, because it hasn't worked anywhere in this country, in Taiwan. So I just as like, I probably won't work anyway. And if it does work, ah, well, I'll cram some burger king in my face, but now it did not work. I just cannot use my card at any of these, ah, self checkout kiosks in Taiwan. But I wonder if part of it could be, because there's some kind of additional layer, like I got receipts through my email for each of my Airbnb's that I've never gotten before, ever booking an Airbnb that were like special government tax receipts, that I just assume have nothing to do with me, I don't know, but, but I guess that's just something to do with business in Taiwan. And I noticed that too on this burger king machine is it asked me at the end, the final step was what kind of receipt, is this a business receipt, is this a something else receipt, or something else receipt? And I was like, I don't fucking know, what the fuck are you talking about? You know, I just have no fucking idea what this is. But I wonder if that's part of the problem. I mean, maybe there's just some extra layer to government taxes or something, I don't know what the fuck it is, that just doesn't play well with foreign cards. So it doesn't, you know, get in whatever, it's just a cash life for me here, but that seems to confirm it, if even my precious burger king doesn't work, nothing's gonna fucking work. But anyway, family mark break, drink my Mandeling, my Mandeling tasty mystery drink.

Oh, this is handy, there's some wifi here. So Mandeling coffee is from Indonesia, Sumatra Mandeling coffee, grown on the lofty volcanic slopes of Mount Lusher, near the port of Padang in the Balak region of West Central Sumatra. So it's like a kind of coffee like, you know, a rabbit or whatever, a robust, so that's cool, that's cool to know, I've never heard of that before.

Well, this is pretty interesting, so see, I got to Chengde Street, CHOMG DE Street, 40:00 and I was walking along it and things got rural, incredibly fast, like the, I think the size of this street on Google Maps is, I don't know if it's accurate, I think it should be one of the smaller, wispier streets, because it's a little narrow street with really no sidewalk, definitely not a place that pedestrian should be. And yeah, just really quickly turned into just the same feeling as being in the mountains in South Korea, or being really rural in Japan, just really rural houses, and just a little rundown, almost shacks, and just all of a sudden, which I haven't seen yet in Taiwan, because I've always been very central in Taipei. So I was walking along, definitely starting to question like, wait a second, what am I doing? You know, I've only gotten to like the start of this adventure, and it's made me realize I've been walking all afternoon, and it's super hot out, and luckily it's still a bit overcast, so that's good to keep the heat from being insane, but I'm pretty wiped, and I'm like, where even is this supposed to lead to? I don't know, it eventually leads to a road, but it looks like it's an underground road, like I don't know how I'm supposed to get out of here, once I get to the other side? I don't know, I was like, maybe this was all a bad idea. I'm a lot more wiped than I thought I was, but this is kind of cool, then I found a side path up to a nice little walking path, so I'm like, all right, this is at least kind of curated, it has some trees and some hedges, and I'm not on the street anymore.

And then behind me, I see Taipei 101 Observatory. I did see that last night just before I got on the subway, at night, it's this big tall building, obviously an observatory type building, it looks a lot like the towers, and tears at the kingdom, it looks a lot like that, and it's just kind of cool, because even though I, all of a sudden, was like, man, things got so rural all of a sudden, but then right behind me, it's like, I, but there's still the city, and there's that big tower and stuff, so I'm in a cool little midway, I'm like, heading into, uh, into the wilds, it feels like, but there's the city right behind me, this big cool tower, and yeah, at least I got a little walkway now, walking on the street, I was like, what am I doing here? Like this looked neat on the map, but in person, it's like, dude, you're not supposed to be here, but here we go, there's this nice little walkway, uh, butterflies, fluttering around, flowers everywhere, it's like, ah, here we go, here we go, so I guess I'll just keep walking along this way for a while, maybe I'll just get to the cool cemetery and come back, because I don't know what's on the other side, there's like mountains ahead of me, not super tall, but tall enough, all covered in trees, I guess as long as I'm still on one of these nice curated walkways, I'll just see how far I can go and see what happens, but this is all quite mysterious, it's only quarter to four, but that is one thing I've been finding kind of interesting, just the way time is set up here, it always gets, uh, dark so early, I mean in the winter, it's, it's, you know, super early, it's dark by five o'clock, but even in the summer by like seven, thirty or eight, it's pretty dark, the time zones I was thinking maybe it's just set up because, obviously, fishing is huge in this part of the world, so maybe the time zones are just set up for fishing, so it will be light at four thirty in the morning, but it's surprising how, uh, quickly you can get caught in the dark at night, even in the summer, so we'll see, I'll just sally forth and just see what happens, this is very nice and very pretty, I guess as long as they keep me on a nice little walkway, I'll continue on, if things get, uh, confusing, then I will give up, it seems like a pretty good policy.

Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew.

Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew. 45:00 Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew.

Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew. But, you know, that's the phantom concern for poor air quality. My main concern, thank God I put on a bunch of suntan lotion today, because fucking shit it got hot all of a sudden. And now I'm heading up, uphill, up stairs.

But yeah, this is nice. This is very pretty. But yeah, nobody, apparently nobody fucking comes here. Even these stairs, which like I said, are quite new. But there's still plants growing up through them and stuff. and yeah the shrine part I was at before mega overgrown and just kind of generally disheveled kind of eerie feeling so I guess we'll see if I even meet one other person today that'll be the test because right now there's fucking nobody this is cool though to get to see out across the town that Taipei Observatory the one-on-one observatory definitely stands out I don't see any other buildings from where I am that are that tall. Now there's some of these business buildings are pretty tall actually they're quite tall but yeah weird man it is nice but this is weird this is a weird spot now I'm heading up wish me luck as the sun tries to fucking melt me all right I think I