Our Trip into Taipei's Past

North Gate, liberated, with the Japanese-built post office in the background. 

Our next urban adventure was a two-day, one night mid-week trip up to North Taiwan. We wanted to plan it out so we weren’t marching around going nowhere, but there's an old Yiddish saying: "People make plans and G-d laughs." One plan for sure was lunch at the Thai restaurant near Taiwan University. My wife mentioned contacting her old friend, William, for a lunch date, but the revitalized DiHua Street Commercial District and the historic area opened up when North Gate was released from its prison between highway overpasses were the main focus of our trip as we stepped back in time in old Taipei.

Early Wednesday morning, we took a taxi to the local Taiwan Railroad station in Taichung for the fifteen minute ride to the High Speed Rail (HSR) fifty minutes to the big city. 

Our trip to Taipei, back into the past, was full of discoveries, but it took me back to "my" past as well; I had lived in Taipei in '78-'79 and again from '84 to '89. We went only as far as Ding Hao, the neighborhood I clandestinely lived in for four months, recuperating from hepatitis, and planning an escape from Taiwan. It brought back many good and bad memories.

 We took the Metro directly to Ding Hao and then walked over to Ren-Ai Road #84, Sec. 3 for lunch with William at "Old Cow’s" Indian curry restaurant, Dazzle 奪愛咖哩坊. Cow, my wife's classmate in college, was mostly gone, getting belated ghost month prayer table fixings, and we spent most time chatting with William, another college classmate. When Cow came back, we watched him set up the table, with tips from William, the real estate agency manager, who knew about such embellishments and peons to Taiwanese Buddhism.

      By 4 pm, we were tired and walked back to Chung-Hsiao Road to get the Metro to the hotel, but first we had to stop off at Eslite Bookstore on Dun-Hua Road. After a short break for juice and machi ice cream, we went up. I found and purchased A New Illustrated History of Taiwan which had finally been translated into English in 2015. I had seen and coveted its Chinese edition at the Tainan History Library a few years ago. The book, published in ’97, had not been updated, a chickening out by the pro-DPP apologist author who, nevertheless, gave lip service to the Sunflower Movement in the editor's notes, without explanation. 

     We got to the Hotel Puri conveniently located up exit 13Y from the underground malls west of Taipei Station, and walked through the defunct grade-level railroad crossing to old streets of  pre-WW II storefronts refurbished for a retro tourist area.

    

 We had dinner Wednesday evening in the Taipei Mall building because, by 8 pm, the local restaurant stalls were closing up; only the franchise restaurants were still open. We saw Le ble d’Or Restaurant was open; the microbrewery with honey beer and German décor, but their entrée of pig knuckles, smoked duck and sausage was sold out, so we had a rice-heavy jambalaya instead. I was so full, all I could drink was a 500 cc mug. 

      My memories of the area behind Taipei Terminal were minimal; shabby stores and soul food stalls at the Yuan-Huan. There was nothing a tourist would have wanted to see in the little, sooty, motorcycle clogged streets in 1979, but the neighborhood has been retro-fixed, using original storefronts from pre-WWII streets, to make a walkingtourist happy (see the building above being retrofitted.) My wife had the right idea taking the hotel close enough to the train station and not far from DiHua Street, but that was as far as her plan went, and I did no research besides watching a History Channel documentary about how the North Gate was liberated from the overpasses in six days this past Lunar New Year to create a portal for Old Town, Taipei. 

     The attractions we missed were more important than the ones we viewed. Sure, it was good to see the Tamshui River without mud, stink, and green slime; there were actually boats on it, though no marine traffic other than branches and plastic bottles. They are still dredging the bottom. The streets of old merchant houses, all with the same Chinese medicine shops and dried plums, dried fish eggs, sharks fin and sea cucumber, were nice enough to see from the curb, though no store was worth going in to, except for one information storefront where my wife got a free district map, and a souvenir shop next door.

     

 We were just about to leave the area, but then my wife reminded herself about a local restaurant, opened since the Japanese era in 1932; a throwback to westernized ritz, called Bolero. It still stands, inconspicuously, amongst a row of fabric and tool stores. It was the place famous Taiwanese writers and artists met to chat and have a western meal, a kind of Cafe Reggio in Greenwich Village. But Bolero is more of a Ratner's, if the Taiwanese intelligentsia were to the Japanese what the Jews were to the Goyum of New York. Looking at the menu, I wondered why a Taiwanese writer would want a smoked salmon omelet or oxtail  

soup anyway, unless they just sipped coffee? Perhaps the Japanese and international traders’ steam-shipping to Taiwan went there, too, before making deals to trade tea or camphor.  
     We went in, the only patrons, sat down, sat on the classic Naugahyde chairs, looked at the vinyl covered bilingual menu booklet, the spiral aluminum banister staircase in back to the second floor, and even met the disinterested waitress who checked back in the kitchen to find an answer to our question about the assorted h’ordurves listed on the menu, ready to order.
     Then, my wife realized we wouldn't have time to eat; we had to check out of the hotel by noon or incur a 300 NT an hour penalty. I sucked back in the saliva dripping down my chin, and with barely a cup of water on the table, we bid farewell to a slightly perplexed manager who tried to squeeze a smile. 

     The shame was that, the night before, at 8 pm after resting up for the evening at the hotel, it was too late to even have dinner at a local noodle stall; they were all closing up, and we didn't know, as we do now, that the Bolero is open for dinner until 9 pm. Oh well; next time, right?

     Hurrying back to the hotel on the sweltering streets of Taipei basin,  we passed the space that was office to the Ming-Bao daily, the Taiwanese run newspaper that helped breathe life into the notion of equality for Taiwanese under Japanese law, with Taiwanese culture intact, ironically thriving for a while in the Japanese era, only to have its editorial staff executed by the retrocession KMT freeing from China. The Chiang Wei-Shui hospital (see photo above c. 1925) is now a museum. We had to pass the little museum by, too, because of poor planning.
      There were a few planned stops on our trip that we at least had to make: the Thai Restaurant in Gu-Guan and the North Gate itself in its new environment.  Taipei metro makes it all possible. Just swipe your Yo-Yo Card on the turnstile and enter. 

     The three locations of concentration we visited in our two day trip would have taken hours to get to through bus-clogged smoke-choked streets in 1978-79, the years I lived in Taipei, and even more impossible with the streets ripped up to build the Metro from 1984 to 1989. This was the biggest change from the Old Taipei, still "old" 25 years ago!       
     The Guinness record of an elevated urban highway removed in six days, two days ahead of schedule, boggles the mind. Imagine the ramp around Grand Central Station being disassembled in six days. Forgetaboutit! With thousands of workers on dozens of cranes and Caterpillars digging and hammering 24 hours a day, the precious and neglected North Gate, encased in three layers of protective I-beams and mesh to  protect it from tones of concrete and debris just feet away, located in the busiest part of town, was saved (see the video below.) With the old post office and railroad museum being refurbished, you will get a good picture of what Taipei looked like before the hastily unplanned modernization of the '60's.