Too Much Fun at To Fun

It was Saturday, and Winnie’s parents were taking us on an excursion to To Fun, a mountain retreat town that had inspired the scenery in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. We woke up early and piled in the car. I had brought Winnie’s theoretical physics book and a notebook along and took it upon myself to rederive the Euler-Lagrange equations for minimizing integrals of specific types of functions, which I was able to do surprisingly quickly, and I explained my proof to Winnie. We ran into traffic but once we got off the highways and up the mountain roads we had a better time. The air smelled good—rich with the perfumes of jungle plants.

We got out in a little parking lot

And climbed some winding stairs

The town reclined on the mountain like an old cat

Its folds conforming to the hill and jungle.

We first hit up a place that served little buckets of chewy, glutinous flour dumplings, flavored with taro and sweet potato, and surrounded by a sweet shave ice rapidly turning into liquid. The iconic food was quite tasty and fantastically chewy. We looked down on the rest of the town and chatted a little bit. I had to stop Winnie from talking about action integrals, a subject which clearly was opaque to her parents.

Then we went off into the heart of the market. We stopped in a shop with lots of little wooden implements. I got a backscratcher for Mary and a pair of chopsticks, but refrained after much decision from the many wooden spatulas and spoons.

We passed a lot of cool places and most of them had free samples. I tried some medicinal marinated fruit (Winnie had given me the dried version when I was sick at the UW), a sesame ball, some melon cake, and much more! We stopped at another random shop because I saw these sweet little Totoro hand fans that my sisters would like. Again, normally I hate this kind of stuff but when everything is 1/3 the price, it’s kinda fun!

We found the specific place that had so captured Miyazaki, a three-story teahouse on a hill painted in beautiful black, with red lanterns and beautiful oriental rooflines. Winnie and I took some cute selfies with all the lanterns. We didn’t go into the teahouse, but it was lovely from the outside.

We got lunch—I got beef noodle again—which was tasty and filling. Then we got shave ice + ice cream—Winnie and I got a fantastic bowl that had chunks of incredibly juicy fresh mango on top.

On our second pass through the shops, Winnie’s folks got some dried fish and tofu jerky, or to gan. The tofu jerky was remarkably good. They got a little extra of both for me to take home.

An interesting note—most of the shops followed “templates”, i.e., there were many nearly identical duplicate copies of the same idea (the glutinous rice shops, the bubble tea shops, the shave ice + ice cream shops, the wood crafts shops, the leather crafts shops, and so on). Everything was a de facto commodity, which kept the prices relatively low, but did not diminish the aesthetic impact of the market as a whole (in fact, I think it strengthened it).

When we emerged from the winding markets, Winnie went in to the 7-11 (of course!) on the main road and got a big jug of water. Then we headed back home. On the way back, after my success with Euler-Lagrange, while Winnie napped, I struggled to reconstitute my proof that the only spherically symmetric function that could be split into a sum of functions of each coordinate, e.g. f(r) = X(x) + Y(y) + Z(z), was the function x^2 + y^2 + z^2 (and constant multiples thereof). I finally got it just as we were pulling into town, to the famous Shilin night market. The street was thronged. We sat down at a table on the sidewalk, and ate some stinky tofu. It was hot and delicious. But, as it turned out, this was only the tip of the iceberg. We went down an escalator into an enormous underground market, just as packed as the aboveground part. Small eats vendors serving 50 different types of plates served counters wrapping around their kitchens. After wandering around a bit, we sat down in a little restaurant’s dining area and had “American Steak” served on cast-iron fajita plates drenched in peppery gravy with eggs on top! It was a weird meal. Winnie and I split a beer. The noise and din in the market was incredible, and Winnie’s parents couldn’t take it for long—they went home. We went to get bubble tea and fresh fruit, then went back up aboveground and drank it. We were being total goofballs—Winnie completely decimated by her one glass of beer. We found that it was terrifically fun to pass the bubble tea boba back and forth in our mouths, and were laughing nonstop for about 10 minutes. We were still talking about some scientific matter—I forget what it was. After the boba were consumed, we checked out the carnival games. We played a hoops game, then a darts game (that was cheap!), watched a rigged-looking game where you have to stand a beer bottle up with a metal ring, went to a game with bows and arrows, then back to the hoops game. We knew we could do it! Winnie bargained with the guy for an extra ball. We had to make 5/7, then. I immediately bricked my first shot! Winnie made her first then bricked her second. Just like that, we were on the ropes. 3 balls left, three hoops to go! I argued that we should take the 3 closer hoops (we had hit 2/3 farther ones). But Winnie wanted the backboard (correctly), and nailed the farthest one. She then left the remaining two balls to me. I hit the first one and then, dripping with sweat, collected myself. Swish! We earned a knockoff Winnie-the-Pooh plushie (technically, Mr. Honey).

We picked up some fried milk (which was amazing, like little cubes of roasted marshmallow almost) and water for the way home. Contentedly we hopped on the metro and arrived back in Beitou. Once home, we finished Goodfellas, watching late into the night. What a movie! It struck me as terrifically honest. I loved the scene at the end where things are falling to pieces, but he still has to prepare pasta for his family and make it to the big dinner.