Julia, official makeup artist of the Haus of Joha, went to Taipei for a make-up competition to battle bitches from Taiwan, Japan and Macau. A bunch of friends were going over for moral support and food. I swiftly agreed to go along, as the last time I was flown over to Taipei for the weekend, I pretty much just went to press conferences and the super-fun agnès b. live, but did not get to do much of the eat-my-way-down-the-whole-freaking-street that is such a part of the Nightlife fabric there.
Traditional Taipei nightlife is Shilin, a nocturnal culinary carnival and the mother of all night markets (runners-up are Feng Chia in Taichung and Marrakech in Morocco, but Marrakech certainly does not have the latest fashion or cheap cute, trendy crap on sale).
I was a bit bummed out when I realized that my Taipei jaunt coincided with Clockenflap weekend, and that I would miss YACHT, Blood Red Shoes and Los Campesinos! at our local music festival, which I’m sure was a marvelous hit and massive debauchery for all Western-leaning residents of Hong Kong, particularly for all those who felt the burn of the Drama on Lamma.
So to fill my Clockenflap void, on the last night in Taipei, I ate, ate, ate, bargained, bought, ate and ate extra through the one-stop smorgasbord that is Shilin, and endless swathe of street stalls and boutiques. Giant deep-fried chicken steak, bitter gourd juice, stank-ass tofu, big sausage wrap little sausage (basically, a Taiwanese hotdog, it’s a sweet spiced Chinese sausage stuffed in glutinous rice shaped like a frankfurter, topped with pickled ginger and cucumbers as relish–the flavor and textural combination is spellbinding.)
I love Taipei. It’s like Guangzhou (or more probably Amoy), Tokyo and L.A. mashed together, packed with incongruent and idiosyncratic neighborhoods as a result of a disparate and colorful cultural colonization. You have your quaint area of boutiques, izakayas, chic bar restos and cute bubble tea cafés, tree-lined boulevards, grandly inelegant contours of Kuomingtang architectural fuckery, and fugly ghetto urban hamlets.
Yaya, Julia’s old Taiwanese roommate from Canada, just got herself a tour-guide permit, so we were her trial tour, her guinea pigs. She called cabs with a discount for us after each shopping or clubbing spree, booked us tables at restaurants and spaces at foot massage parlors, organized a karaoke sing-off plus buffet with 10 people (where I got to enthrall the locals with a song from my Taiwanese repertoire) and facilitated our way through Shilin night market to ease our transformation into bloated sea cows. Thank you, Yaya. Kamshia! (that’s Taiwanese for “thanks for making us fat.”)