Cheap as you are

Taipei has of course been amazing in every way.

"Hello!" said the woman two tables down from me at the vegetarian restaurant. "Why don't you do language exchange with my son? He can teach you Mandarin Chinese!"

I explained that I was only in Taiwan on holidays. She at first misunderstood me ("No, not tomorrow!!") and then appeared indifferent.

Then later, "why don't you use your clips?"

She was not the first to mention these clips. It was the most confusing situation. There were clips that I was supposed to clip somewhere to show that I wanted a dish. Only I couldn't see where to clip them, nor did I especially want to clip them anywhere if it meant ordering anything above and beyond the phenomenal buffet. But people kept coming up to me and saying things about the clips. "Clip!" "Clip!"

It is SO easy to be vegetarian here, and luckily the Chinese characters for the word match up perfectly with Japanese. The choice and quality has been simply astounding, but I have to say there is a sort of bitter/sour flavour, a spice of some kind no doubt, underlying many of the dishes that for me is an acquired taste. It's definitely an incredible city for food though – apparently as the island did not suffer the ravages of the cultural revolution, traditional and unique Chinese cooking styles have been preserved. And there are SO many things to try.

On that note, two of T's Taiwanese friends basically force-fed us all Friday evening, from restaurant to market stall to late-night noodle shop. They were the most weird and wonderful girls, straight out of Chungking Express and it was an incredibly fun night. This episode really warrants MUCH more detail but I haven't the energy now.

T went back to Japan on Sunday. My plane leaves for Sydney in 4.5 hours and although I am excited about heading back to Adelaide, I have this gut feeling that there's a bit of a nasty road ahead. I hope I'm wrong.