Once we got into Taipei, we hit the city for my final night. After getting dropped off by Chris' grandfather (who I really need to learn enough Mandarin/Taiwanese to thank...), we (me, Chris, and Chris' dad) wandered around Taipei 101 for a while. The building was impressive, but there's only so much to do other than going to the top (which we decided against), and shopping luxury brands wasn't on my short list.
We left and hit Taipei's night market. i got to use the subway system in Taipei, which was absurdly smooth, fast, and clean. Keep trying, MBTA. You're not terrible. It was the right time to see a couple of high schoolers transit-ing home, which I found surprisingly entertaining. We just wandered the night market and ate food, which I'm pretty sure is the thing to do at a night market. There are non-consumable things to buy, but I barely saw anyone actually browsing those. (Somebody must buy some, though...) I finally go to try some shaved ice! (Pictures depict less than half of consumed food.)
We then went home pretty early, since I was on a old person schedule, and had a morning flight. The bus system was also incredibly clean, modern, and smooth. I had fully intended to crash immediately upon getting back to the apartment, but realized it might be rude to the people hosting me. After I decided to hang out for a bit, Chris' grandfather whipped out some impressive (prepared?) English, asking me if I wanted a beer. I actually just wanted to crash, but I wasn't going to refuse a beer. (Chris and I were the only people who drank in the apartment, so I got the impression this beer was specially bought for me.)
I then got to try Taiwan Beer's honey beer. It was a great decision to accept. I don't think I had had a honey beer before, but I'll definitely be looking out for them now. This was probably the best beer I've had since leaving America. And went surprisingly well with cherry tomatoes, which were also offered to me. After drinking the beer and being amused by conversation and a TV drama that I understood neither of, I slept.
I rolled out of bed at 6:40 (which was pretty late for me this week, honestly), and made my way to the airport, again driven by Chris' grandfather. On the flight I read Out of the Silent Planet. I didn't know C. S. Lewis did sci-fi as well as fantasy. It was definitely early sci-fi, in that certain tropes weren't well defined yet. (There was a spaceship that had a gravitational pull toward the center. Everyone knows that it's either a centrifugal acceleration toward the outside, or else no gravity.) The Martians (sorry, Malacandrians), were pretty cool, and he really committed to how lower gravity and a thinner atmosphere shaped organisms and landscapes. (Oh, and there was also a decent plot in there, but I'm a sucker for worldbuilding.)
I also watched Your Name again. Great movie, better on second watch. All the little scenes that I didn't get in my sleep-deprived state on the first watch made perfect sense. The memory-loss thing still aggrivates me to no end, but I think that's the point. My only grievance with the movie is the last 40 seconds. Mild spoilers incoming: They should not have walked past each other on the staircase at first. It was stupid and just attempted to add tension to a scene that was already appropropriately climatic. And who runs a quarter mile just to look down and be awkward?
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