The Kimchi Life: Taipei

“Ouch! Ok! I get it: I need more sleep!” The misuse painfully prodded my right big toe. The pain I felt apparently told him I wasn’t getting my 8 hours. The problem was he had already demonstrated this on my left toe. This was Taipei , Taiwan , and I had escaped Korea for the four day weekend in order to get away from all my stresses and just relax. This foot massage was not the relaxing, tension reducing experience I had imagined. It hurt. And it tickled enough to make it uncomfortable. It was all I could do to keep from wrenching my foot out of the misuse’s hands.

“He says to relax,” my friend Grant informed me. He was getting his first foot massage too in the chair next to me.

“I…am...trying,” I said through clenched teeth.

Forty minutes later I was relieved to have the massage end. Nevertheless, despite the discomfort, it worked. My feet felt relaxed and the pain from walking around all day was gone. I won’t say that it was pleasurable, but it did do the job.

The Chinese are famous for their belief that foot massages can help heal the rest of the body. Nerve endings from all parts of the body- organs and muscles, end in the foot. According to Chinese medicine, if one massages these endings it will have a positive effect on the rest of the body. I don’t know if it works, but a massage every once in awhile certainly never hurt anyone.

Two of Grant’s friends met up with us after the massage and we walked through one of the night markets that Taipei is famous for. This particular one is infamously named “Snake Alley”. The Chinese also believe in the good medicinal effects of eating snakes. The alley is filled with restaurants offering snake dishes. Cages of snakes lined the walkway, and a man with a white boa constrictor shouted out, trying to entice people into his restaurant. An elderly woman strung up a medium sized snake and butchered in front of the crowd, peeling off its skin and pulling out its guts. If she was trying to make snake look more appetizing, it wasn’t working.

I’m always up for new experiences and so the four of us chose a restaurant and pulled up some

chairs beside a shelf full of bottles of Chinese liquor and ordered two bowls of snake soup to share. It was pretty anti-climatic. The broth tasted like fish and the snake…you guessed it…tasted like chicken. Except chicken that you have to pick off of hundreds of small ribs, like when eating a whole fish.

“Oh! This is snake penis alcohol,” Grant excitedly told me, pulling a bottle off the shelf. “You’re joking.” “Nope. Snake. Penis. Alcohol.” He pointed out the three Chinese characters. I know what you’re thinking and yes, each bottle had its very own penis inside. And no, it just looked like a long piece of ragged meat preserved in formaldehyde. I would have never guessed what it was. But, thanks to Grant, that small piece of knowledge merely added to the experience.

I met Grant on Couchsurfing.com and he offered to house me and show me around his city. He’s just a year younger than me and we quickly became good friends over the three quick days I was in Taiwan . He showed me around this, the capital and largest city in Taiwan .

For years Taiwan was only famous for its dilapidated buildings, pollution, overpopulation, and being dirty. Chiang Kai-Shek and his Nationalist forces fled here after loosing the Chinese civil war to Mao Tse-tung and the Communists. It was never meant to be a permanent capital city as he planned on quickly returning to mainland China and reclaim for the Nationalist forces. Because of this, along with the fact that he despised the local Taiwanese, considering them inferior to mainlanders, he never bothered to upgrade or develop Taiwan for the almost 30 years he ruled the country with an iron fist. He was hardly more democratic than the Communists he “saved” the island from.

Fast forward to the 21^st century and Taiwan is quickly changing. Sure, a lot of the buildings are still dilapidated and dirty. And snake markets still make great tourist attractions, but ritzy shopping malls and other development are popping up all over the place. This Asian Tiger, like South Korea, has pulled itself up from the dregs of authoritarian rule and is finally coming of its own. The future remains uncertain. Beijing is hell bent on bringing Taiwan- a rogue region in their eyes- back into its fold. But until that day happens, Taiwan seems set on reinventing itself.

To be continued...