Bitte schön

The tea tasted bitter. It was more bitter than anything I’d ever tasted before. It was bitter like tonic water, only without the water. Bitter like the pith taken from a truckload load of citrus, concentrated into one millilitre of liquid. It was as if the bar had run out of lemon and limes but was still happy to go ahead just serving the bitters. The tea was throat-contractingly, teeth-clenchingly bitter. It’s not that the tea was bitter, the tea was bitter. It was bitterness, distilled. It was the exact taste that, through millions of years of human evolution, my body had been programmed to instinctively reject. The taste of poison was passing over my tongue and making its way down my esophagus and I was willingly letting it happen.

So-called ‘Herb Lane’ sat just behind Longshan Temple. During the day, the small market alley had a few rows of stalls selling Chinese herbs used to gain and maintain good health. If you had a problem, there was a dried plant in the alley that could heal you. On my tour in and around the temple on the night I visited, there was only one vendor still working. Our tour guide explained that, for a minimal fee, we could try some Chinese medicinal tea which would be sure to fix any present or future ailments.

I chose the Good Health And Vitality Tea. I didn’t have anything particularly wrong with me at that point in time, or at least no problems that I was willing to fess up to, so I chose the first thing on the menu. When in doubt, choose the first thing on the menu. It’s usually the most popular or at least the thing that the shop thinks they do best. The Good Health And Vitality Tea was cold and bitter, like a distant relative who thinks that you don’t call enough. It had quite a strong, bitter taste like that of a very over-brewed cup of oolong tea. I slowly made my way through the cup over the course of the next twenty minutes, internally applauding myself when I finally finished it.

I was proud of myself for completing the tea. However it was nothing like the next brew, simply translated as ‘Bitter Tea’. The tour guide passed around a shot glass full of the stuff to each of us. After having a full cup of the Good Health And Vitality Tea I thought I could get through any other brew with ease. I was wrong. It was very, very, very bitter. Compared to this new tea, the Good Health And Vitality Tea was pure, refined sugar. The Good Health And Vitality Tea was the spoon full of sugar helping the Bitter Tea medicine go down. The translation was appropriate, the tea tasted of nothing else but bitterness.

Outside of temple tours and bitter herbs, my first time in Taipei seemed to be a lot about a competition I was having internally with myself about how much I could squeeze into my five day visit. How many times could I visit the same temple? (3); How many times could I have convenience store sesame noodles for breakfast? (5); How many museums could I visit in a single day? (3); How many times did I need to eat stinky tofu before knowing if I liked it? (1); How many full-sized servings of food could I have at the night markets on my first night before feeling sick? (4); How many full-sized servings of food would I have at the night markets on my first night? (5).

Taipei itself was a place that felt like a mix of a lot of other Asian capitals. It had the scooter-flooded chaos of Bangkok or Beijing. The business area near Taipei 101, formerly the world’s tallest building, had sleek skyscrapers and large shopping malls and food courts filled with shirt-and-trouser-wearing office workers on their lunch breaks. The area felt like downtown Singapore. The convenient metro and train system transported locals and tourists, running clean and on time like the Tokyo metro. And, of course, every other street in the city was closed off each evening and filled with night markets selling countless local and international dishes. There are similar places with evening markets in southeast Asia but that aspect was unequivocally Taipei.