Having been staying in Taipei for well over three months, by default or by design, I have become a habitual visitor to a few places that weave the fabric of my life as an "expatriate" in a city I was born and grew up in decades ago.
There are commercial gyms and community sports centers pretty much everywhere in the city, but too crummy and crowded for my liking, so I decided to check on some "VIP Health Club" hosted by some five-star hotels offering their fitness facility to due paying members outside their hotel guests. There is one such hotel nearby where I live, about 10 minutes walk away, presumably perfect for regular visits. So I bought a one-day pass to check it out.It has everything: workout floor, steam room, sauna, spa, and an outdoor swimming pool, nice and dandy. The show stopper, however, is the pool is on the 20+th floor of the hotel while the rest of the facility is on the basement floor. Imagine going half naked in between these places... Not for me.
Then I checked out this other hotel that we stayed during those pandemic quarantine times whose room and services we were quite happy with. It's got the same whole nine yards: spa, sauna, steam room, exercise equipment, and a two-lane outdoor swimming pool, at a smaller scale than the other one, but more ergonomically laid out and all on one same floor, with a nice service crew. I signed up with them right away.
I have since been going to the place averaging three or four days a week. My routine starts at the workout room, going through seven or eight different machines, morphing into the steam room for a sweaty detox, going to the outdoor pool for lap swimming, heading back in for hot spa, cold dip, hot spa, cold dip, then a long sit in the sauna room, before taking a shower and heading home, for a total of roughly two-hour run.
For its tiny footprint, one thing I was concerned about was it might be easily crowded out, especially for the two-lane-only swimming pool. To my pleasant surprise, that never happens. For all these times I've been using the facility, I have rarely met another swimmer at the pool, nor other users at the steam room or sauna cabin, and no more than two or three people at the same time exercising in the workout room or sitting in the spa. As I splay still in the cold water well, body heat reaching perfect equilibrium with the surrounding chill, all quiet and all alone, I feel more like being in a private meditative chamber than in a public sweathouse!
As for the commute, it's only two subway stations away from where I live. But I can—and prefer to—take the bus too, which comes almost every two minutes and allows open street views that the subway can't. Or on sunny days I'll take the city-run rental bicycle that gets me to the club about the same time as the subway or the bus—kudos to the excellent public transportation systems in Taipei!
There is literally one coffee shop at every street corner in Taipei. One day I strolled into one of these in my neighborhood and saw/heard a young musician playing viola at the corner of the store. I grabbed a table right next to him and started enjoying the music. They were a mixture of classic, folk, and pop scores, and all of a sudden I heard one that sounded mysteriously familiar, then I realized it was one of the songs that my chorus group in SoCal had been practicing for a while. So I chatted with him afterwards, and he said he—along with the City Orchestra—had actually worked with a chorus group from LA recently... He then played that song again just for me so I could record it...
He is actually one member of a string orchestra team the coffee house (a chain of three coffee houses plus one ice cream parlor) had recently organized. Consisting of about a dozen young male musicians, they take turn playing at each of these coffee houses, sometimes single, most of the time twosome or threesome in concerto, in the afternoon or in the evening, usually free (as long as you spend the minimum required consumption at the store), at times charging admission fees.
I took my wife to one of those evening paid performances and she loved it. It was a piano and cello concerto by two young men in their early 20's. The house was packed. We chatted with a middle aged woman who sat across our table, she said she'd been a fanatic follower of this particular cello player for quite some time. A younger couple sitting next to us said they were recent converts to such cafe concerts for its easy atmosphere and flexible hours that provide for an enjoyable evening at the end of a busy work day.
We have since been to all three of these coffee houses for their coffee/cake/meals with concerts, and got to know almost all the team members. They are in general recent graduates from musical schools, each with numerous performance and award records under their belt, and all very handsome (and cute)! Maybe that's why many of their fans are middle aged women and my wife always leaves generous tips to them at the end of their performances, with the excuse of "helping out these starving young musicians"!
Tamsui (淡水) is a seaside community a half hour away from Taipei City. It has been a popular go-to place for the townspeople, not only for its easy reach through the train, but also its unique mix of geographical beauty and legendary history.
It's where the river meets the sea, the old British consulate residence and the Spanish fort standing on the hill, overlooking the harbor where Dr. George Leslie Mackay, a Canadian Presbyterian missionary landed and established the first Presbyterian church in northern Taiwan some 150 years ago, and where local militia fought off an invading French naval fleet some 140 years ago.
I have visited the place quite a few times through the years: Strolling along the riverside boardwalks and the old-town district, crossing the harbor on boat and on bridge, visiting the old fort and the consulate residence and Dr. Mackay's dormitory turned modern day art gallery, besides bicycling all the way from Taipei to and around its coasts.
This time around, a friend who lives in the area took me on his sports car for a ride, to scenes I've never seen before: a couple of bucolic country roads hidden between major arteries, a fallowed rice paddy turned scenic pond, and some palace like structures that I wouldn't know are for cremation ashes storage had he not told me so.
We also went across town to have lunch at a beef noodle place whose chef-owner is an erstwhile general who used to run a big chain of beef noodle shops across the strait in mainland China until the pandemic hit and he decided to call it quits, retire and settle down here for good.
Another, contemporary legendary story going on in Tamsui, I suppose.
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