Sometimes I make my own breakfast, and even then, if I can, I still go out and sit at the breakfast place for a while, read the newspaper, and absorb the city's awakening, and I feel that I'm really awake.
Taipei is really a very strange city. I counted 20 or so breakfast stores in the streets and alleys of my old neighborhood, not counting the bakeries and coffee shops that are open in the morning, and I guess it's a rare sight in the world that there are so many people who simply serve breakfast.
Taipei's unique breakfast stores all have a frying station in front of the door, smoking, selling Chinese egg cakes and soybean milk, as well as Western-style hamburgers and milk tea, and the signage, though extensive, is pretty much the same thing, broken down and put back together again. But at least you can sit for an hour like in a coffee shop, yet it's much cheaper and easier. Here, people automatically strip away the elegant and intellectual style of coffee shop life, and naturally develop a style of breakfast store life unique to Taiwan's small islands that is truly built by demand and limited resource allocation. Everyone is in a hurry, not paying attention or caring about others, eating, reading the newspaper and leaving. No fuss, no romance, a solid, concrete morning, a place to get ready for battle and load up the magazines. Despite having to endure the fumes and the owner's high-decibel recitation of the order, I especially miss Taipei's sharp mornings whenever I go abroad.
Elaine Chen: The beauty of daily life is in the day-to-day but joyfulness
The first time I went to France, the streets were full of cafes, the kind you see in movies and postcards. Most of the men I saw having breakfast in the cafes were wearing suits and reading newspapers while a croissant, a glass of juice and a small cup of coffee were simply placed on the table. Even though I was already in France, sitting at an outdoor café and sipping my coffee, I still felt like I was "in Paris" rather than actually being there. In other words, I couldn't really get into the scene, but rather, it was as if I was walking into a window, posing, and copying a leisurely and romantic gesture. The open-air location was just right for smoking cigarettes and pedestrians eyeing each other, the indoor location was right for conversation and intimate demeanor, and it wasn't just shyness and fear of the smell of cigarette smoke that made sitting in a coffee shop and spending long hours reading even more of a waste, the colorfulness of the city that was just waiting to be explored, so much so that, aside from going to the restroom and checking the map on the fly, I started to get a little tired of the coffee shops. Then I switched to attacking any bakery that looked good on the street, and if I was lucky I would take freshly baked bread and juice, walk to the small park nearby, sit on a park chair, cross my legs and feed the pigeons while I ate. And now I often miss the quiet time in the park every day to enjoy a side of the world.
Taipei is certainly one of the most convenient cities in the world.
I'll never forget the ten minutes I spent in Berlin, in the middle of a Siberian winter, standing in the doorway of my rented apartment, debating whether or not to go out at eight o'clock in the evening to buy an egg and cream. It wasn't even eight o'clock in the evening, it seemed like two o'clock in the night outside the door, there were no pedestrians, very few cars passing by, a thin layer of frost on the road, I didn't have enough clothes with me, and I had to go to the supermarket a few blocks away to buy something.
I miss the convenience stores in Taipei that sell hot food. I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to do this, but I'm sure I'll be able to do it in a few hours. The cafes in Berlin each have their own unique flavor, some are like warehouses, some are like studies, and some are like the living room of your own home, which corresponds to the impression of Berlin's cold and hard history, but the people here are surprisingly friendly and enthusiastic, and I've seen the longest café menus I've ever seen. The breakfast menu alone is several pages long, with different ways of cooking eggs, types of cheese, different flavored tea bags, vegetables or fruits, and sauces drizzled on top....... I couldn't understand the lengthy German menu, but through a friend's translation, I found out that the poached eggs could be cooked to a certain doneness, and the tea bags could be steeped for a few minutes, which is the German way of being strict. I forget if I took a picture of this menu, but I remember the breakfast that consumed an entire pleasant morning.
It was a disaster in Venice, sitting next to St. Mark's Square in what is possibly the world's most expensive coffee shop. At our beautiful table in a space decorated with baroque ceilings and furniture, the contents of a silver tray were a pot of black tea with the all-too-unusual ham and egg sandwiches, the most common combination I've seen in Taipei. The total for three people was close to four thousand Taiwan dollars. This cozy is really too expensive. So expensive that even the pigeons flying in the sky outside the window of St. Mark's Square, as if to make up for this expensive, as if they are trying to fly for me.
In those days, I was on my period and didn't have enough hygiene products, but I realized that the area where I was staying didn't even have a pharmacy, let alone a convenience store. The only thing left is the souvenir stores, except for the restaurants and the designer clothes stores. They sell masquerade masks, postcards of the Bridge of Sighs, and key rings with gondolas on them. The inhabitants, who have suffered from flooding due to the subsidence of the ground, have long since evacuated. At night, the whole city looks like an empty city, with no TVs in the deep streets, no lights in the houses lining the waterfront, and not a single piece of luxury cotton wool to be found anywhere. I did not expect to experience the tormented daily life of ancient women in an ancient city, fortunately the temporary assistance of fellow travelers, otherwise the mobility and pain can be imagined. In this even less suitable for tourism season, is still overcrowded Venice, daytime and postcard everywhere you go and the mysterious silence has a big difference, only in the dusk to climb the bell tower bird's eye view of the whole of Venice, listening to the night after the street performers lonesome guitar, late at night for the first time by boat on Venice first glimpse of the stunned, in order to put together mottled masks after the few remaining gorgeous.
At breakfast places in Taipei, I usually have two slices of white toast with a cup of black tea. Just when I can't concentrate on reading the words on the page, or almost simultaneously begin to no longer tolerate the fumes, I leave. The length of the stay varies from ten minutes to two hours.
The beauty of everyday life is often the beauty of willingly repeating something over and over again that seems uninteresting but is enjoyable. Between your choices, it reveals your character and temperament, and because of the character and temperament of the city you are in, our responses gradually accumulate the aesthetics of life in this city.
Every time I look out onto the street, the father, who appears on his motorcycle carrying his little friend, pauses the car at the curb with the keys still inserted and white smoke still coming out of the exhaust pipe, and the father and son, wearing helmets, wait in front of the breakfast parlor, staring down at the gradually ripening devilled eggs together. Three minutes to spare, carrying a hot breakfast away with a still sleepy child. By this time I might be looking down to continue reading, or it might be almost time to get ready to go home and take the freshly washed clothes out of the washer while the sun is shining all over. (Excerpted from/Edith Chen's "Not on the Other Side")