I noticed a store near my house today that I hadn’t seen before, perhaps because it’s often closed — with the metal gate pulled down over the front — when I’m out and about in the neighborhood. I mentioned to my friend Fann Meeiyuan that sometimes a place takes on an entirely different look depending on the time of day.
So, naturally, she took me to just such a place.
When I visited Xichang Street near the Longshan (Dragon Mountain) Temple during the day it was so uninteresting that I didn’t take a single picture. In fact, the most interesting thing about it was the sound: it was a “typhoon day” — offices and schools were closed because of an approaching storm — but since the weather was still fine, people were making use of the holiday to visit the inexpensive karaoke joints along the street.
But when Fann Meeiyuan and I visited at night — also a holiday evening, the night before Taiwan’s October 10 National Day celebration — the street was unrecognizable. The road was closed to traffic to make room for a street market specializing in medicinal herbs. In shop after shop, spilling out over the sidewalk and into the street, were boxes, barrels, and bundles of leaves, tubers, stems, roots, rhizomes, seeds, and gigantic aloe vera plants.
Fann Meeiyuan went to this market to buy a special herb that she brews into a bitter medicinal tea. She bought three enormous bags of little sticks (looked like something you’d feed a pony) — enough to keep her in the pink of health for a couple of months.
I’m sporting a black eye at the moment (the result of a failure to follow EVERYONE’s instructions to be careful in the countryside), so we asked one of the vendors if she had anything for bruises. I ended up with sack of prepackaged herbal medicine and instructions for brewing and drinking it.
I don’t know whether it will work, but at least it tastes better than Fann Meeiyuan’s bitter drink!
Did it work?