Walking through a city, a few questions tend to stay with me.
Why are there so many drink shops?
Why do so many trends seem to begin in Taichung?
Why do night markets, wherever you go, settle into such familiar shapes?
This is a place for those small questions that hardly matter, yet somehow linger. I think about them while walking.
Many of these notes end without a clear answer.
They are simply things I found myself thinking about along the way.
Taiwan
In Taipei, the same red Yonghe Doujiang sign can appear several times within a short walk, while each shop has a different owner and its own version of breakfast. The signs look like a chain’s network, but there is no visible organization holding them together.
Taiwan
At a Taipei street stall, the lid lifts on a row of xiaolongbao whose pleats are close enough to look uniform, but not quite identical. By the time the sauce arrives, the steam has already begun to disappear and the wrappers have changed.
Malaysia
Curry has blurred the fried chicken, egg, and okra into one brown plate, but the cashier names a price almost before it reaches the counter. The judgment leaves no visible calculation—and no receipt explaining it.
Taiwan
In Taipei, beef noodle soup is common enough to anchor a menu, while “pork noodle soup” is difficult to find. Pork has not disappeared from the bowl; it appears under names like lu rou fan, paigu, and rou zao instead.
Taiwan
On a walk through Taipei, the next drink shop often appears before the last one has left the frame—along office roads, beside MRT exits, and on residential corners. Students carry cups past delivery riders collecting more, while each storefront seems to feed the same daily traffic.
Taiwan
Walking along Fuxing South Road without looking for a drink, I pass another small shop at nearly every turn—different colors on the signs, nearly identical spaces beneath them. At the next red light, clear cups appear in a surprising number of hands, lifted between buses, crossings, and errands.
Taiwan
At the end of a night market, empty bubble-tea cups gather beside the bins, their remaining pearls hidden under melting ice. A single drink makes them easy to overlook; multiplied across Taiwan, the beads become a different kind of object.
Taiwan
At a Taiwanese night market, the oyster omelet arrives with plump oysters, soft starch, and a pink glaze already spread across its surface. Brown sauce and mayonnaise sit nearby on other foods, but this plate is left exactly as it is.
Taiwan
On a Taiwanese night-market griddle, the oyster omelet moves slightly as it cooks. It is neither crisp like Bangkok’s hoi thod nor nearly liquid like or suan, but suspended in a soft middle of starch, egg, and oysters.
Taiwan
A Tainan oyster omelet looks like a fragile night-market snack: oysters, egg, starch, and sauce set over a hot griddle. Put that plate beside the 1661 siege of Fort Zeelandia, and its ingredients begin to look less like a recipe than a list of things available outside the walls.