Taiwan. Touch your heart. Or so say the touristy signs scattered through out the island. It’s quite a place I must say.

Wednesday we explored the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which was beautiful; the grounds looked like an actual palace. It had a huge collection of Chinese art, pottery, and inscriptions. We got to see the ancient predecessors to characters like mother and how they evolved into the ones used today.

We went to our first night market Wednesday night. All these street vendors cram into any space available on the street along a few city blocks to hawk their wares—from pottery to bootleg CDs—at ridiculously cheap prices. The streets get so congested the cops come every now and then, forcing the vendors in the middle of the street to flee down dark alleys until it’s safe to return minutes later. It’s a sensory assault, with neon glowing from the storefronts and blinking lights and the smell of fried donuts mixing with incense from another table, exhaust from the occasional moped who tries to force through the street, and stinking tofu, which I still can’t disassociate with the raw sewage I once smelled in Tennessee.

Everything is dirt cheap—especially the clothes. Where else can you get a genuine Abcidas sports bag for only US$5? Or a Chanel Paris bag marked “Do not remove from store”? But apparently English is quite a fashion statement. Even reputable stores like the Net (which suspiciously looks a lot like the Gap) carry shirts printed in English, from basic messages like American Style to those with simple but blatant typos to those that simply make no sense (“RNEY: A Product Hist About Ory About A Product”). But the English need not even be complete phrases; we saw plenty of hats and shirts that were just collages of random English words. So it makes sense that you could take it one step further and just throw random letters from our alphabet onto a shirt and call it cool. By far the best find of the night though was a pair of panties with the word FUCK printed on them. Pics of all of these should be in the Taipei gallery soon.

Thursday we took a bus down to visit another of Tim’s uncles’ families in Hsinyin, down south in the tropics (literally). It was definitely tropical…if by tropical you mean rainy. The Taiwan long distance buses are no Greyhounds… they’re like La-Z-Boys on wheels. Massaging La-Z-Boys. With personal video monitors. Makes the Marguerite look like a ghetto banger.