Trying Something New in Jiufen

A little over a year ago, I snuck away to Taiwan for a long weekend in the ramp up to my MBA graduation.

On my second day, my best friend’s cousin picked me up on his motorbike at the train station in Keelung, just outside of Taipei. We spent the morning devouring conveyor-belt sushi, sampling custard wheel cakes, and sipping the kind of custom iced coffee with a plastic seal that you punch through with a straw.

By the afternoon, we had switched into his mom’s car and were bonding over our shared love of rap — I introduced him to Drake and he refreshed my memory of Eminem.

An hour later, we arrived in Jiufen, a hillside town best known as the setting for Spirited Away. We wandered up to the top of the main shopping street and sat ourselves down with bowls brimming with shaved ice and taro balls. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either, and remembered that it’s always worth it to try something new.

As I think back on this moment now, as the world stands largely still, I know that this is what I miss the most about wandering to the edges of the earth — trying something for the first time, somewhere newly familiar, with a newly dear friend.