Home is where you stay

Over the past few days have been trying to find a place to play badminton and was not so successful on my own. Found a place called Zhong shan Sports Center (NO 2, Zhong Shan N. road, sec 2 lane 44.), this place is quite good has a swimming pool too. If you have a playing partner this would be a good place to sweat out. I later found out that most of the people who play actually form teams and then lease a court collectively for a specified duration. So having a localite to point you to a team would be the easiest way to play badminton here.

This is where my taiwan colleague malcolm helped me by introducing me to a friend of his Matthew. He stayed at a place near to neihu so I got the additional advantage of a pick up and drop. So this sat and sun morning was spent playing badminton with their team. Most of the members of the team were in their middle age, wonder where the younger generation went !!! But one thing is for sure that the chinese people defy their age when it comes to fitness. They do have an initial inertia when interacting with strangers but as they get to know this curtain drops and their warmth and friendliness comes out.

During a trip to the local supermarket we picked up some “Chinese salted egg”. It is supposed to be kept/cooked in a saline solution to hence the name. Tasted pretty salty ha ha. My taiwan colleagues told that it goes very well with porridges. They talked about the 1000 year or century egg, which is supposed to be made by storing underground for long periods of time. I remember seeing this but could never get myself to try it out. Anyway for that I guess i should rely on dutta who is an eat all (Eats anything and everything).

Around sunday evening the sky became darker, slowly a drizzle followed. A call to a friend jason confirmed that we will shortly have a typhoon passing over taiwan. A day off on monday was the news which made us happy. The night saw some heavy downpour and rough winds rattling anything not sturdy. Typhoon Haitang brought taipei to a standstill for a day. We were in the meantime having a test of our culinery skills, prepared some pretty yummy dishes. Well offcourse we did give some competion to kumbakarna also. Kumbakarna is a character in the hindu epic ramayana who is supposed to sleep for months to get up only for his food.

Taiwan has a lot of parks for a good walk, one such park near the place where we stay is beihu park. It is infact a beautiful lake and in the sunny days you will find a good deal of people angling there. A walk around it gave us a cool breeze with that distinct aura of freshness, a rare treat in a city.

Drinking is certainly a favourite activity… So how do you make it more interesting!! well play games while drinking. One such drinking game is…..

Frog Legs
You basically build up a progression in this game and the guy who goes wrong is the loser who will probably do a bottom’s up. So the series is like this … 1 Frog, 4 legs, “plock” (tell this word), “jump into water” (tell this word), 2 Frogs, 8 legs, “plock”, “Plock”, “jump into water”. and so on, so on ….. Pretty good game try with your friends.

Tipsy count
A person starts of by pouring an amount of drink into a glass (If you use whisky your game would probably end faster ha ha). In the next step everybody shows out a number using their hands. The number is summed up. You start counting from the person who started the game. The last person on whom the count ends is supposed to do a bottoms up of the drink (Kaanpey is the word). He now is the winner and search goes on for the next winner……

This was a game which we played at a chinese pub with some colleagues. David su is the champion at this game as he can never get drunk. In between the game we had couple of betel nut vendors interrupt us trying to sell their wares. We wound up at around 9:30 with all the married people returning to their homes. And now i had to decide what to do next.

So i decided to drink some more…. This time I went to a place called B1 (No. 71, Aiguo E. Rd. Taipei Ph: 02-2397-0506) To tell about this place we go there on the weekends because it is a drink all and at 500 NTD it is a damn cheap place. A pretty comfortable and youngish crowd is what you get. But on this thursday night at 10:00 pm I could not find a drinking soul there at that place.

I called up my friend in US (Mahesh) to pass some time and his suggestion was to go find a more happenning place. I did disturb him at his work but he still spared some time to talk the usual so so so stuff.

I then set out to find a new happenning place and lost my way on the way and ended up asking directions from an expat at a tea shop. He had some directions for me. The chinese shop owner came out joined in with his suggestions.

After a good walk across the daan park and a taxi ride I landed up in a an another drinking hole called Vaccum space (20X, Fushing south road). Some more drinks and talk was I guess how i wound up thursday.

Back home in a taxi was a very hiccup-py ( i just could not stop them) ride ha ha. How do you stop hiccups ??