Trip to Taipei

5-18-14 6:10pm Sun. (3)

      Leona and I just got back from two days and a night in Taipei. The weather was good down to the last leg of the way home; it was raining while we waited at The New Wu-Er station but it had stopped by the time we de-trained at the Tai-Yuan station and picked up the scooter to ride home.

     We did everything I hoped to do in Taipei, with the exception of going to the Palace Museum; Leona just won’t go there. We didn’t have much time to go there, anyway but, whatever. Saturday, when we arrived at 10:30, we stayed underground at Taipei Station and transferred from the HSR to the TRA local subway and took it to the Eslite Flagship building near the 101 Building. First we went to the floors with their large bookstore. They have a big selection in English. I got The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll by Preston Lauterbach, One Hundred Years of Solitude by recently departed Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler; three very different books from three very different eras, the last two novels.

      After finding books, we went to the Eslite food court in the basement for lunch and then we went back upstairs to the floor with the music CD’s. Leona replaced three CD collections we had lost in the Hurricane Sandy flood: Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Hits,” “Celine Dion” self-titled and “Let’s Talk About Love” CD’s, and “Time After Time, The Cyndi Lauper Collection.” She also got a DVD of “Whitesnake Live at Donington 1990.” I got a 199NT close-out DVD of “Glen Campbell in Concert” in Sioux Falls, SD in 2001, before he got Alzheimer’s. As for CD’s, I got a cool ten CD set called “Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll; Rough and Rowdy” with over two hundred ‘Hits and Rarities,’ most of them I don’t have and have never heard.

I also got “Ramones” first self-titled CD and “Rough Guide to Blues Legends: Blind Blake Reborn and Remastered” which includes a second CD “Ragtime Blues & Hokum.” 

      If that wasn’t enough, today we went back to the Eslite Bookstore near Taiwan University where I picked up a beautiful book; Charles Darwin: On The Origin of Species; The Illustrated Edition, general editor, David Quammen. At $30us, it was the most expensive item Leona or I bought. Leona bough two political books in Chinese: Simplicity is Beauty and a satire by ‘The Fisherman,’ a comic artist.

      Right now I’m munching on barbeque bacon from a Bee Cheng Hiang store near our hotel so I don’t want to touch any of them. After having breakfast at the hotel on Cheng Shao Road near Ding Hao, we went to the area near Taiwan University to have lunch in our favorite Thai restaurant and to buy some cat supplies from a pet store there. After going back to Eslite, we took the TRA back to Taipei Station and took the HSR home to Taichung.

      The main reason for Leona agreeing to go to Taipei was to celebrate the grand re-opening of her friend’s curry restaurant on Ren-I Road near the Howard Hotel with a dozen friends. “Cow” has had a restaurant there for twenty-four years. At one point he had three restaurants including a stall at the 101 Building. But after a failed marriage and some hard times, he is left with this one outlet that was in need of up-dating. His and Leona’s mutual junior college friends, Boris and Jenny, did the remodeling in two weeks while the Indian chef went on vacation back to India.