Eating my way through the Chinese Zodiac in Taipei

Years before, when we were both still high school students in Joburg, we had lain around my room chain smoking and dreaming about leaving the suburbs behind forever. He had a longstanding date with New York. I was headed to Edinburgh. Now here I was, 24, freshly graduated and en route to Taipei to teach English for a year. If my decision had been swayed by the fact that he was living there — in the city he had left as a child and returned to as an adult — well, I wasn’t willing to admit it when I got off the plane. Taipei was smaller, prettier and more vertical than I had expected. Cupped in a bowl of lush green hills it felt like someone had squeezed it until the city had nowhere to go but up. It was not only architecturally dense but also dense with sound and smell. Every street was a messy ballet of people, scooters, street food vendors and neon signs. Even the air was thick enough to eat. I felt like I had fallen into the traffic scene from Luc Besson’s Fifth Element. <a href="https://medium.com/@ambrenicolson_25774/eating-my-way-through-the-chinese-zodiac-in-taipei-fb033cc78931">Visit Now</a>