Part the first--In which Beethoven's Ode to Joy does not play from my bellybutton--and never will March 6, 2009
(Your fearless sculptor is traveling in Taiwan through April. I am staying in the Taipei Artists' Village in central Taipei. This is my fourth trip to “The Beautiful Isle” of Formosa. One American dollar is worth about 35 NT$.)
In the end, I decided I did not need a wireless waistband amplifier. There are a lot of people in Taiwan who do, but I am not one of them.
I didn't buy a chocolate Moon Pie shaped Scotch tape dispenser either, though I was sorely tempted.
What broke me was the option of Japanese heavy bombers or German fighter planes of the First World war, or a model electric guitar on offer a few aisles over from the brightly packaged high end seaweed, Swiss Muesli cereal and Italian wines.
I was in the grocery store located on the second of four basement levels and food courts in Shin Kong Department Store on Zhong Xiao Rd. in downtown Taipei.
I stared at the pile of boxes, most marked down to NT$99 ($US 3). Vivaldi's trumpet concertos blared overhead; Taiwanese shoppers pushed past me, their shopping carts piled with frozen squid balls; yam and red bean soup; powdered goat's milk. They were oblivious to both Vivaldi and the Red Baron, not to mention the collectable card and small piece of bubble gum inside (I found out about the card and gum later. All the writing on the boxes was in Japanese—come to think of it, maybe that's why the Taiwanese shoppers didn't bite—they couldn't read the boxes.)
Illiteracy didn't stop me.
I bought a biplane; a battleship; and a Fender guitar.
They would go well with my Swiss Muesli cereal, I thought.
When was the last time you could buy these things in your grocery store? Okay. Well, I'll bet not with best quality seaweed.
I know.
You don't care about the little biplanes and guitars. You don't even care about my Virgil descending into this circle of consumer Hell. She was a young woman wearing huge, blue anime contacts in her eyes, dressed in a 1950s airline stewardess costume and waving hands gloved in translucent white lace. She was a Shin Kong Department store elevator operator.
I know.
You want to know why so many people here need a wireless waistband amplifier/speaker.
The short answer is underwear.
There an innumerable number of street vendors. The ones selling underwear, bustiers, tee shirts, panty hose, often stand dressed in several layers in the night markets along the streets, hawking their wares. You can see for yourself how the underwear fits, on a live model--even if she is wearing several layers of hose and tank tops. The hawkers have headset microphones that would do a Madonna concert proud, but until technology came to the rescue with wireless waistband amplifiers, the speakers were a weak point. They had to be set up to one side and the wires complicated getting the underwear on and off.
Fascinating sociology, you may say. But you have to agree, the prospect of Joel Haas standing on a street corner wearing three sets of Fruit of the Looms while gyrating to Asian techno rock and offering you a terrific deal on tank tops, is both remote, and more than the imagination of mortal man can endure.
I don't need a wireless waistband amplifier.
Note the battleship even comes with its own little strip of blue water to dominate. The chiclet size piece of gum is in the wrapper in the foreground.
Below, a fully strung guitar model only 3 inches long. Your hamster can rock out on one this size.
As for the Moon Pie shaped Scotch tape dispenser:
It seems I was wandering in an area of town full of “cram schools.” For parents who can afford it, children are sent to after school schools for tutoring or cramming to pass certain subjects (often English). Until I found this out, I was puzzled by the large number of stores in the area specializing in school supplies. Add to this the fact that pastries, or any sort of sweet beyond fresh fruits, are foreign to Chinese cooking. Over the past few years, though, wheat and sugar based cooking has swept the country. There is an international baking and bakers expo being held here later this month in the same area the Taiwanese consumer electronics manufacturers use; Dunkin' Donuts and Cold Stone Creamery are making inroads here.
Thus:
3M is marketing the “Dessert Plate” line of Scotch tape dispensers to schoolgirls, brightly colored plastic models of doughnuts, cakes, etc. Collect them all and fool your friends, I suppose. (Well, doughnuts are 'double sided sticky' sometimes.)
I did buy were some “cartridge pen” calligraphy brushes. Cram schools teach calligraphy, too. “Penmanship” as we called it in schools in the US, is still an important subject here. Practicing with a brush you don't keep re dipping in ink is probably more efficient.
Just as in America where you could buy lined paper with dotted lines showing your child just how far below the line a “j” goes, you can buy lined, or, rather, squared off, calligraphy practice paper in the cram school stationery stores.
Note the beige handle brush pen has a small bottle of ink and wick like material to soak it up and replace the old wick full of ink the pen handle; an unusual "cartridge pen" by Western standards.
The type of ball point pen used must be a matter of fashion, too. I saw literally thousands of colors and styles of pens on offer. The other money makers for these stores are the types of pencil holders, phone covers, etc. school girls love. You have never seen so much Hello Kitty stuff in your life.
For the geek or techno nerd, NOVA, is the store which must circulate on a cloud near the right hand of God. A 12 story high building filled with nearly a 100 vendors of every imaginable electronic, computer, photography gadget on the market, it was here I saw the wireless waistband amplifier. It was here I bought a set of speakers for my Mac laptop for $US 7 (I should have shopped some of the other floors—I found them for about $US 5 there).
This is, I would like to emphasize, a legitimate market. This is not pirated stuff or stolen stuff. For computers, the prices are about what you'd pay at Best Buys in the US. There are no mega market companies like Best Buys or the recently defunct Circuit City, so the small stores here have to buy at a lesser discount, but make up the loss by saving on nearly zero shipping costs. Since there are so many small sellers and they are all together, they have to slash their profit margins to nearly nothing, so the effective price comes about the same as you'd pay in the States.
So many other things that happened to me and there are so many other things to write about—the sidewalks; the garbage trucks playing classical music as they move about the streets at night; “stinky” tofu; my favorite down home Chinese breakfast joint (nearly unchanged since I was last there in July 2005); the embarrassment of having saved $NT 3700 from my 2005 trip only to find the currency design has changed and the clerk's reaction when offered “old money;” how easy it is to buy a new SIM card for a cell phone in country that doesn't sell “locked” cell phones like in the States; and my tour of a gym—California Fitness—strategically placed between Cold Stone Creamery and Dunkin' Donuts on one side and Starbucks on the other. It is amazingly like the Seaboard Fitness Center I use at home. The manager gave me, my wife, and brother a free VIP pass for the next two months. I suppose if you call yourself California Fitness, it helps to have a few Caucasians working out in the showroom windows on the treadmills and ellipticals.
The first night here, I found myself running back to the Taipei Artist Village in the rain because I was too cheap to spend $US 3 on an umbrella until it was too late and all the umbrellas were sold. Then there was the almost risque comedy of a Japanese Buddhist nun in a grocery store helping me buy an umbrella the next day.
Which leads me to a final bit of explaining I have to do. It's why there are only a few photos of brush pens and model guitars with this travel report. It has been raining hard most of the time and the wind's been gusting louder and harder than me on my fourth beer in the middle of a good story, so I have not been able to get any good outdoor photos yet.
For those who just can't stand it, my write up with photos about my favorite down home Chinese breakfast joint can be downloaded at
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/151983/The%20Bread%20Maker-photos.doc
and a number of photos from my previous trips on Flickr at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joelhaas/sets/
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