A Saturday jaunt
As it was raining in Taipei this morning, Ray, Chenbl and I headed south in search of blue skies. We found them in Miaoli, where the weather was brilliant. Our first stop was an old unused train station that has become a tourist attraction. We ignored the man in the flack jacket trying to get us to park further away from the village than we wanted, but we ended up driving through the town and out the other side, even further away and up a hill, such was the number of cars.
We walked up the tracks for a bit. Though I’d brought the Invincible Rabbit, I didn’t feel in the mood for taking pictures. A bottle of tea improved my spirits, though. We took pictures of fallen leaves, old women in conical hats, etc. The station itself was tiny. I tried and failed to imagine what it was like before all the tourist-trapping, a sleepy little town that happened to be the highest station on the line.
After climbing back to the car, which thankfully was still there after Ray knicked another car while parking, we drove down to the famous “broken bridge” that everyone takes pictures of. It was quite picturesque in the fading late-afternoon light. But we’d planned to watch the sunset on the coast, so we raced out towards Tongxiao and ended up on an embankment in front of a large, multi-stacked factory. A group of people were taking pictures of each other jumping in the air in front of the sunset, but they left soon after we arrived and we were alone. We climbed down the steep embankment to approach the water’s edge, but I found via a rather disgusting experiment that the sludge wouldn’t hold my weight, so we sat on the stones and took pictures of the sunset and each other taking pictures of the sunset and each other until it was too dark to see.
The map said that the narrow road ran all the way around the factory, but the map lied; in reality it ended just beyond where we parked, with no way to turn around. Ray had to back up in the darkness for about half a mile, Chenbl hanging out the back window with a flashlight.
It took us a while to get back to Taipei due to traffic, but the semi-Italian dinner we had at Zhongxiao-Xinsheng restaurant made up for it. Gordon joined us beforehand, fresh from a business trip to Shenzhen, and he seemed to like the food, something that was worrying us beforehand as he’s a bit of a conniseur of Italian food.
In other news, have you seen the latest Olympus ad with Kevin Spacey? A lot of people say it’s snob-on-snob snobbery, but I have to agree with him. I don’t want to be that guy either.
