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
At a Taiwanese breakfast shop, the careful order is iced soy milk with half sugar. Nearby, black tea soy milk waits in a metal container already mixed, chilled, and fully sweetened, leaving no room to negotiate with the cup.
Taiwan
At a Taiwanese breakfast shop, xiaolongbao arrive in the same bamboo baskets as soy milk and steamed buns, their wrappers puffed and bread-soft rather than thin enough to show the soup inside. They look less like delicate dim sum than something meant to be carried out the door before work.
Taiwan
In Taipei’s Xinyi and Zhongshan districts, where a café latte can cost 150 NT dollars, narrow side-street shops serve soy milk and egg crepes for a combined 60. By dawn, paper bags are already moving across the counter faster than most cafés manage all day.
Taiwan
At a Taiwan breakfast counter, asking for soy milk can bring either a cold, sweet glass or a hot bowl of vinegar-curdled curds with fried dough, shrimp, and scallions. They share a name, but one behaves like a drink and the other like a soup.
Taiwan
Each day, 200,000 YouBike rides pass through Taipei, adding up to a distance that would make a scooter’s fuel gauge look very different. Along the handlebars, plastic bags hold another kind of fuel: cups of bubble milk tea.