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Published: March 22nd 2011
The Night Market
Families flock to it.We are back in winter weather and will be until we leave Hong Kong. Keelung is the port city for Taipei which is located about an hour inland. Since we arrived in the evening, we decided to go to the night market in Keelung. There are hundreds of food stalls offering some exotic delicacies, many unrecognizable. Oyster omelets and breaded eel are crowd favorites. We stopped at a hotel to get a restaurant recommendation and ended up at a nice Mom and Pop eatery. We were the only foreigners in there until the Captain and his wife showed up. Captain Mario had eaten at the restaurant a number of years ago and after a lot of searching had found it again. The sautéed pea leaves were the best along with the braised lettuce in oyster sauce.
The next day we got up early for a half day tour into Taipei. It was cold and rainy in Keelung--- not the best weather for touring. But as soon as we reached Taipei the rain stopped and we were able to enjoy this lovely city. The Taiwan National Palace Museum has some of the best Chinese artifacts in the world. During the Japanese
Keelung River
We had a nice stroll here. occupation in WWII many of the pieces were hidden in Taiwan. Then when Chiang Kai-shek fled the mainland after being defeated by Chairman Mao he took more loot with him. I was so pleasantly surprised by Taipei with all of their parks, tree-lined boulevards and very little traffic congestion. The city is surrounded by mountains and this adds to the sense of greenery. We visited the Martyr Shrine for a changing of the guard ceremony and then on to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall which is quite an impressive monument to the old revolutionary.
We came back to a rainy port and after a nice lunch and a well earned foot massage we set sail for Korea. There had been some concern about going to Korea and China since they are directly west of Japan. We have been watching the news of the unfolding catastrophe in Japan. Earthquake, tsunami, nuclear radiation, rain and snow, aftershocks...it just keeps getting worse! Fortunately for us the prevailing winds in Japan are from west to east thus pushing the radiation out to the Pacific instead of contaminating their Asian neighbors across the Sea of Japan. It is especially disconcerting to us—Kevin and I
met and courted in Japan in 1969. We used to take the train to Sendai to ski in the Japanese Alps. It is a sad irony that the only nation to have experienced a nuclear bomb would now be the one suffering the effects of a nuclear accident. After WWII many Japanese were totally against the building of nuclear plants. Maybe the skeptics were right...at the very least perhaps reactors should not have been built on the coast of a country that is so prone to earthquakes. The live videos of the tidal wave coming ashore looks like something out of a science fiction horror film. I would never have believed the absolute power and destruction of these waves. On a smaller scale we also saw a video of the wave sweeping through the Santa Cruz harbor sinking boats and wrecking the marina. We are so fortunate that the San Francisco Bay area was spared. We are just now hearing about the devastation in Midway Island, Hawaii and the Galapagos Islands as the waves spread throughout the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese culture is imbued with a quality called “gaman.” This is the ability to endure the unendurable. This trait probably
developed over centuries of natural and human disasters. Hopefully this attribute will carry the Japanese through this latest crisis as they go about the task of rebuilding their shattered country.
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