“Every year of my life since I was two,” Dominic Crapuchettes tells me, “I would go up to Alaska in the summer and my dad would fish.” A few years later, they worked the fishing boat together through long, challenging days, and the job, he explains, was hard. “If you go way back to when I was seven, I was miserable.”
A conversation with the designer of one of my favourite boardgames, Evolution.
There are all sorts in Taipei. Sharply dressed businesspeople, heads down, hands to their sides, trying to assume the most aerodynamic shape possible as they charge towards the MRT. Potbellied old men with their t-shirts pulled up, wafting humid air onto their slick tummies. Ladies – and I mean ladies in the most regal senseContinue reading “The Bird People of Da’An Park”
The rules to our expedition were simple: walk, and walk, and walk, and don’t head back until our feet have whittled down to red raw stumps.
On that last point, we were quite successful.
By 5:00am I am out of the door, greeted by the approaching dawn. The sky is shifting from black to a brighter grey. If you don’t stop for a moment and take notice, the world seems silent and still. But I have learned to look and listen. Birds are talking, trees are creaking, clouds are starting to take shape as the darkness gives way.
“Everyone loves a night market,” Pamela tells me. “There are many of them all across Taipei, and in different cities throughout Taiwan. They usually open at around 6pm and can get really, really busy. Regular streets and roads are suddenly occupied by hundreds of shops, usually tiny stalls with just a couple of people at work. Sometimes, it’ll just be the shop owner, taking money, chatting to the customers, and cooking the food – all at the same time! It can get very hectic.”
That bike ride to Oxford was one of my very first adventures, in the sense that I really thought about it as an adventure, not a holiday, or a trip, or a day out. And even though it was small, hardly worth mentioning, really, and even though I failed, it’s still one of my absolute favourites.
Borderline Pointless 