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Asia Pants – Daytripping!

Hey everybody! I think I’ve mentioned before that I lived in Taiwan for two years. I can thus happily say I have great friends in Taiwan, and seeing these cool people for the first time in a long time is helping make my trip a lot of fun. Taiwanese people are incredibly friendly. They like to go on day trips a lot and they like to make sure that their friends have a good time. This is a win win situation for John! Recently my friend Ana and her boyfriend Wei-Da took me to Danshui, just north of Taipei.

I actually met Ana in Manchester, not in Taiwan. She was studying her Masters at fashion school there. Now she works in design and manufacturing for a firm in Taipei. Her boyfriend Wei-Da is a teacher and fitness instructor. When I first met Wei-Da, his name was Feng-Hua. However, he and Ana want to get married, and he changed his name on the advice of a suanming (kind of like a fortune teller) so that they would have better luck as a couple and a better chance of a happy marriage. True story. Here we are in our group photo, looking tough! Kinda.

So, on the day of the trip to Danshui, we agreed to meet at Ximen Ding, home to the famous Exit 6 and teenagers that cover the spectrum from cute and innocent to cool and moody.

Loafing seems so awesome when you’re sixteen.

Anyway, Danshui is just north of Taipei, and a fairly common location for a quick day trip. This is mainly because it’s right on the sea. Little did I realize that a day to the seaside on the weekend regardless of how depressing the weather is a mainstay in both Irish and Taiwanese culture.

Then, we went for to sample some of the famous local delicacies. Or, erm, pizza.

I did not suspect pizza with sweet potato on it would taste good, but as you can see, we were snapping it up quicker than I could get a photograph. This could have been due in part to the rather cool looking but not particularly tasty cornflake salad on offer.

So what to do with a belly full of pizza? Clearly it was time to roam around a secondary school with a hundred or so other people while kids sat there listening to their teacher on a Saturday.

Unimpressed, to say the least. The school was kinda nice, though. To be fair.

Really, it was all a prelude to more eating. Danshui is particularly famous for a food called agei, which is a ball of tofu wrapped around rice noodles, served in a thick sauce. I went for the ‘medium spicy’; I like spicy food but I’m not that good at handling the rougher stuff, and agei’s reputation preceded it.

I should have gone for the light spicy, for sure.

Luckily there were plenty of opportunities nearby to cool off with a drink, including these awesome people who have a coffee shop on their motorbike! They pull up on the street and convert a little box on the back of the bike to a full-on coffee dispensing emporium!! That’s probably a very bad use of the word emporium, but I really wanted to write emporium. Emporium.

It’s great. They brew the coffee for you right there! Finally, none of us realized that we had visited Danshui on the same day as a festival celebrating the Baosheng Da Di, the god responsible for the bounty of children and safe pregnancies. We drove past an incredibly long parade, but I didn’t manage to get a photograph! I did, however, get a great shot on the street of this guy.

There’s a man in there underneath that big costume, walking VERY SLOWLY so he doesn’t fall over and cause absolute mayhem. These guys are awesome.

That’s it for another blog post! I’m actually writing from Japan, where I am deathly sick and spending my first day or two inside an apartment. Wonderful, I know. More on that next week, perhaps!!

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