Maybe the best food in the universe. Peking Duck baked to greasy perfection: first the crunchy skin, cut up then pieced together into a flat duck shape on the platter, then the gleaming flesh, also laid out like a duck whose goose had been…Read More

Maybe the best food in the universe. Peking Duck baked to greasy perfection: first the crunchy skin, cut up then pieced together into a flat duck shape on the platter, then the gleaming flesh, also laid out like a duck whose goose had been cooked, head, butt and all. They say in the old Emperial days, they would eat the skin and discard the meat. Myself, I liked them both, rolled up in little won ton tortillas with leeks and plum sauce. Or you might get Steamed Shrimp on Crispy Rice, another gaudy treat that everybody else would take notice of. First a huge pot full of broken sheets of, essentially, rice crispies: rice fried into hard sheets in a pan. I would reach out and break off a chunk of the rice quickly before the other waiters came up with an iron pot holding gallons of hot, red shrimp soup. They would pour the steaming shrimp on top of the rice sheets, creating the ultimate in snap, crackle, pop, not to mention clouds of glorious steam and aroma. Then they would smash the rice sheets, now busily soaking up soup, with spatulas, spoon the works into bowls and hand the bowls around the table. You just don't get drama like that in your average Chinese restaurant. And that's just the two dishes I most remember. The Hotel was, no doubt about it, Grand.

Now the "Gemo" is dead, the Madame is dead (or so it is claimed) and Taipei has first class hotels all over the downtown. Hotels from major international chains, dragons in their own right if we are to accept the anti-corporate attitudes of the WTO generation. They are slick, efficient, busy, impressive. But they will never be Grand.

I love hot springs, and Taiwan has some good ones. I used to go to soak at a huge stone lodge up above Grass Mountain, a hostel for Japanese pilots during the world war. The building is Japanese pre-war construction that you find…Read More

I love hot springs, and Taiwan has some good ones. I used to go to soak at a huge stone lodge up above Grass Mountain, a hostel for Japanese pilots during the world war. The building is Japanese pre-war construction that you find all over Taiwan: what you'd call colonial. Massive stone in the strange "style that is no style" the Japanese built in the first half of the century. Generic British, but without anything British about it.

Inside, a classic example of Japanese mountain spa, like the big ones at Noburibetsu. A maze of pools, some so hot your skin feels like it's exploded the second you step in, some bubbling with white sulfur, some clear, frigid stream water. The world needs more places like this.

To me, Taipei is not really a place. It is a room full of curtains, each curtain concealing the ones behind it, each curtain composed of times I lived in the houses of my family, a family so extended it approaches infinity. In…Read More

To me, Taipei is not really a place. It is a room full of curtains, each curtain concealing the ones behind it, each curtain composed of times I lived in the houses of my family, a family so extended it approaches infinity. In my memories I can walk from my uncle's house on Jen Ai Lu (now torn down for the new hospital) into a bedroom in my grandparent's compound in Shih Lin, and look out the window at my maternal aunt's garden out on Nanking Road. Three visits to Tai Chung over a period of ten years fade into one strange, dreamlike weekend. I remember very clearly walking from a distant cousin's house by the river to the old city gate by the Koumingtang building at the age of five--an impossible trip.

I'm sorry, but you will find nothing about hotels or shopping on this page. It is personal, I suppose, an explanation of the journals I have been writing. These entries are not about the Taipei (or Hong Kong or San Francisco or Singapore) that you might visit tomorrow, they are my memories of places as they were when I was much younger. Some might be the same today, some might not. Is this a legitimate way to write for a travel website? I don't know. It seems that when you visit a place or read a guide book, the first thing they do is go into the history of the place, as if vanished castles and dead kings and forgotten wars are as important to you as where to get a good cup of coffee. So maybe this is a history of places. Maybe it's just a silly collection of neurotic essays by a woman who is confused, a woman who lived in many places at many times in her life, and to whom visiting a past year always involves visiting a different place. Time and space are relative, according to Einstein. Well, he should have met my relatives.

You can tell I feel guilty about putting this stuff on a travel site. Igougo.com caught my eye and I was thinking of recording my travels in Asia and North America, but as soon as I started going back and writing about places, I slipped into those times, and into who I was then: often a clash between I think I am now. So I have recently been doing some traveling of a different sort, and have decided to catalog and record it. As I approach the age of thirty, I have found myself becoming absorbed in my own past, trying to unravel some thread of identity from a shreds of memory I have suddenly been pulling out from my old closets, re-reading and perhaps re-writing from my own back issues. I have already found that when I share these memories by people who shared the original experiences that there are differences: sometimes slight flavors or discord, sometimes extreme discrepancies of fact. I am a scientist: when I investigate, I write things down. I am not really looking for The Truth, I don't think, or even What Really Happened. I think I am trying to build a past that will work for me, support the present I wish for. We plan and sacrifice to construct useful, desirable futures for ourselves; why can't we do the same for our pasts.

My family is a puzzle to me now, my marriage a joke so badly told that nobody can even come up with the punch line, my own childhood a robe sewn together from many different houses and cities in American and Asia. Something back there is not what I recall, something went wrong, and I am being pulled backwards, as if in a eddy in time, which I consider dangerous and unwholesome, although it might just as well be a form of healing, or a means of editing the present. I am not a believer in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy (as I said, I am a scientist) but there are other ways to interpret the unraveling and reweaving of the past. I think there is something very Chinese in an obsession with the past, in ordering it to the needs of the present, and vice versa. Chinese are supposed to venerate the past, the ancestors that we grew out of. It is fashionable to speak of our "inner child", but actually is that not just the past child? If the child is father to the man (mother to the woman?) would not my younger self be an ancestor. Shouldn't I find or create something I can venerate?

Memory of places is the faultiest of all, I think. What should be the most concrete thing in the world, the physical reality, can be very mobile in the hands of memory. Most people know (or at least agree to) certain unreliability in memories of places. We nod our heads when people mention visiting a childhood home and finding it smaller than we remember from when we were smaller ourselves. But it goes beyond that, I think. Our childish forebears warp reality a great deal when seeing it, and then more when storing that vision away. A neighbor's dog becomes a slavering monster, a dirty local market becomes a magical bazaar, painted wood becomes gold, an hour ferry ride becomes a long and arduous voyage, a parent becomes a god, a cousin becomes a demon. These changes are guides to our history, a map to who we were becoming, I think. We tell ourselves stories and paint ourselves pictures for a reason. Maybe all memories are "recovered" and we recover them the way we restore ruined cities: nobody knows if they look the same as before, what matters is that they look right to us.

Recently built, looks like a giant bamboo. Still the tallest building in the world. Great location, a fabulous shopping area, it is much better than the Taipei Main Station shopping area. A well planned spot with convenient transportation. …Read More

Recently built, looks like a giant bamboo. Still the tallest building in the world. Great location, a fabulous shopping area, it is much better than the Taipei Main Station shopping area. A well planned spot with convenient transportation. Close

This once-a-small-fishing-village becomes a hot spot today. To taste the real food of Taiwan, this is another place you must come beside Shihlin Night Market. You can taste some fantastic seafood and local food here. The grill squid is very very good. But the most…Read More

This once-a-small-fishing-village becomes a hot spot today. To taste the real food of Taiwan, this is another place you must come beside Shihlin Night Market.

You can taste some fantastic seafood and local food here. The grill squid is very very good. But the most popular food here are 'iron egg' and crispy shrimp sticks. Iron egg is the one you will find in Fear Factor, but people just die for it.

There is a breathtaking sunset scene and plenty of artists performing. Close

Fascinating place to go. One of the landmarks of Taipei, built in memorial of their former President. Magnificant Chinese-style buildings. There are two great theaters in addition to the museum. It is a must-see place if you visit Taipei. …Read More

Fascinating place to go. One of the landmarks of Taipei, built in memorial of their former President. Magnificant Chinese-style buildings. There are two great theaters in addition to the museum. It is a must-see place if you visit Taipei. Close

TPE - Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport has two terminals and is located 40km southwest of Taipei. Ground transportation offers buses and taxis. Bus service has destinations that include Taipei, Taichung, Banciao, Taoyuan, and Jhongli. Taxis operating out of the airport have been screened and approved…Read More

TPE - Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport has two terminals and is located 40km southwest of Taipei.

Ground transportation offers buses and taxis. Bus service has destinations that include Taipei, Taichung, Banciao, Taoyuan, and Jhongli. Taxis operating out of the airport have been screened and approved by the Aviation Police Bureau.

After exiting customs, get cash from an ATM and follow the crowd to the bus booths selling tickets. We chose Taipei Main Railway station (the last bus stop), which is for us idiots who don't know. Our hotel was right nearby. There are a string of taxis we hopped aboard for all of a 2-minute ride after the driver called on his mobile phone to find out where it was and even pointed it out to us.

E-Clean Coin Laundry, located between 159 and 161 Shida Rd./Roosevelt Rd. Sec. 3, is open 24 hours for doing your own laundry. It is very close to MRT station Taipower Building, exit 5. We spotted this place by chance riding the bus to Wulai. There’s a…Read More

E-Clean Coin Laundry, located between 159 and 161 Shida Rd./Roosevelt Rd. Sec. 3, is open 24 hours for doing your own laundry. It is very close to MRT station Taipower Building, exit 5. We spotted this place by chance riding the bus to Wulai.

There’s a coin changer. Laundry supplies are available for purchase from the vending machines, with scissors for cutting open the packaging. There's a small basin to rinse your hands and a small counter provided for folding your laundry if it isn't being used. There are front-loading washers and dryers. The washers do an excellent job of extracting the water out of the clothes at the end of the cycle.

A business that lets you do your own laundry is a rare find, and there's a fast food restaurant very close by, so you can eat while doing your laundry (the restaurant closes at 8pm).

Phone: 0952-76-3132.

It's August 26th, 1982. After a lengthy delay in Bangkok - my letter of recommendation was from a university, not a government office - I finally arrive at the CKS airport in Taiwan. Didn't realize that it's about 40 km or an hour from the…Read More

It's August 26th, 1982.

After a lengthy delay in Bangkok - my letter of recommendation was from a university, not a government office - I finally arrive at the CKS airport in Taiwan. Didn't realize that it's about 40 km or an hour from the city.....

No problem. A friendly Taiwanese guy allows me and my out-sized rucksack to climb onto the back of his Vespa. He drives me through traffic that makes me want me to close my eyes, get off, hide somewhere. He doesn't only drive me to the university - he spends hours trying to locate some people that I want to hook up with here.

If all people here are as friendly, helpful and hospitable, I am going to like this place.

My father had told me that in his days the Grand Hotel had been owned by Madame Chiang Kai Shek, wife of the man they called, for some odd reason, the "Generalisimo". And that therefore there had never been a first class hotel in…Read More

My father had told me that in his days the Grand Hotel had been owned by Madame Chiang Kai Shek, wife of the man they called, for some odd reason, the "Generalisimo". And that therefore there had never been a first class hotel in Taipei when she was alive--permits always denied. Not that finding a room was a problem: when we went to Taipei we had dozens of places we could stay, we had to rotate among them to satisfy various family members who deserved the honor of hosting us. Sometimes my parents and we four children stayed at three different houses at once in order to spread our familial devotion (and to spread our impact on any one household). Which was fine with me, I much preferred staying alone with an aging aunt everyone still called Mei Mei (which is also what they called me until I was twelve and put a crushing stop to it) without my father being around to stop her from spoiling me rotten with candied ginger and citron soda and evenings rooting around in her heirlooms brought from "the old country" and trying on all her old clothes in front of a big round "moon" mirror in a carved wood frame so old the wood grain shone through the smoky lacquer. And she let me go play in the school yard, where I met working class children with clothing, haircuts, and vocabularies that would have horrified my mother.

But, for some reason, the very name of Madame Chiang put a dark stamp on the Grand in my mind. I suppose I had heard her spoken of by adults, especially among my mother's family, who were native Taiwanese, and thought of her as an evil, scheming witch who was running the country (straight to hell) behind the facade of the doddering "Gemo". She was a painted ogre to me, a precursor to Yoko Ono, the Bitchisimo. And I never knew why, or what she had done that was so bad. Who needed other hotels, when there was the Grand?

I have to tell you that Taipei is rather short on grandeur. In the mid-seventies it was uglier yet, but more livable, I think. Much of it could only be described as squalid. Let me put it this way, foreigners coined a word for a special kind of smog caused by the normal pollution and mist mingling with the smoke from a million dried dung fires in a thousand tenements: "shmit". The only buildings made to last had been constructed during the Japanese rule, the only buildings that looked like they worked had been put up by Americans. It's a crowded, rackety shambles, actually. But the Grand Hotel, sitting on it's own mountain across the river from the end of Chung Shan Pei Lu, was grandeur by the acre.

There were long swimming pools surrounded by stylish gardens, only slightly greenish, their sides kept clean by huge snails. There were red clay tennis courts, which for years I associated with the exotic rich and royalty. There was the vault of stone, the thrust of bold walls. And there was the Golden Dragon room. It might have been the most beautiful place in town, and certainly as capable of instilling awe in a child as any of the dark temples full of monsters. But I saw it as an evil grotto, lair of the designing black widow called The Madame. Not that I didn't enjoy the food.

But family excursions to the delicious and overpriced Golden Dragon generally petrified me. The process started as soon as we drove across the bridge in my uncle's shiny Mercedes 220, the fine paint job concealing the car's previous life as a taxi. We passed armed guards at the kiosk where the road started it's climb up the hill to the Grand, tall grim men in starched uniforms with their heads turned into mirrored balls by their chromed army helmets, their holstered Mausers looking extremely sinister. They eyed us as we drove past, I was sure, taking us in for the record, passing the word to higher ups. Then we would be under the huge stone porte cochere and stepping out under the threatening eyes of liveried doormen. Minions of whom? The Madame, of course. We were entering her den: dungeons and dragons. To be sure we were walking of thick red carpet with Mandarin designs, but she could afford to do things that way. Just look at the heating system: a huge "pot-bellied" wood stove made of solid brass, with thirty feet of solid brass stovepipe leading up the red felt walls to the invisible ceiling in the velvet murk above. We were walking right in to the dark entry hall that gleamed with polished metal and power wrapped tightly in wealth. The endless red carpet led us through gilded round moon gates: it is probably my imagination that there were so many. Or is it? The Woman was everywhere, the Wicked Witch of the Far East. Then I would come, generally dragged or carried, into its presence.

I would skirt by the rough rock walls around the pool, trying to look over them and down into the water, where I would only see huge, placid koi swimming languidly over the coins people threw into the water. The fountain just had that look that automatically makes people assume it would be a good idea to throw money in. My brothers, as usual, schemed on good ideas to get the money out. I wouldn't have touched those coins for all the latte in Starbucks, myself. Do you know where the water came from? Too bad, I'm going to tell you anyway. Get ready to be horrified. In the center of the pool rose a column of very rough-edged rocks, artfully piled up without a sign of mortar or support. Improbably landscape, a Chinese scroll painting. I didn't want to look, but couldn't help myself. There, looping around a rock, a two foot coil of scaly gold with a satanic tail: The DRAGON!!!!!!!!

And of course, seeing one terrible segment of the Beast would drag my eyes, kicking and screaming, upwards to the next insinuating loop of gold, this one perhaps sprouting a huge chicken's foot with three huge claws that could disembowel me in a second. Further up, more (and larger, thicker, more swollen and throbbing) segments of the Dragon, weaving his evil way through the rocks, clutching with those horrendous claws. My brothers were in ecstasy at this point, and would have been more so if I'd been stupid enough to let them know how terrified and revolted I was. And then, looming out of the top of the rocks, leaning out hideously over us, was the huge, spiky, yawning maw of the Dragon's head. This was not the rascal Puff, this was a Chinese dragon, all wide eyes, gaping mouth, outraged and avenging expression. Whiskers trailing back from mouth and brow, jade eyes expressing millennia of cunning and misbegotten wisdom, and endless number of sharp fangs as long as my hands leaning over us, sizing us up, studying the menu. And from those fangs was dripping a steady trickle of poisonous snot, which splashed into the pool below where my idiot brothers, oblivious to clear and present damnation, were trying to fish out a few ten yuan coins. The koi had to be in on it. I was in the belly of the Beast, trapped by the basilisk stare of the Golden Dragon...behind whose jade eyes undoubtedly lurked the hooded gaze of his mistress. But, as I say, the food was very good.