One of the popular destinations close to Taipei is the Yingge Ceramics Streets. This is one of my wife's favorite places to visit, because she really likes "old things". That, and shopping for good quality pottery and gemstones for cheap. So for some visiting tourists as well as some of her friends, she organized a trip to a "wifey shopping spree adventure". To be fair, we arranged a tourist attraction at a pottery/art workshop, and the shops themselves have some pretty interesting items for sale.
The nice part is it's about an hour's train ride away. This time was also pretty convenient because you can simply use your metrocard to beep in and pay. I recall it being quite a pain before that.
It was a cloudy and on/off rain day, and also a work day, so we got to enjoy the cobbled streets without the masses. The cloudy atmosphere fits the vibe of these streets and shops quite nicely also. Come to think of it, I've been here several times and my memories of this place always seem to be when it is cloudy. The old, musty feel of the place. In the picture you can see some of the pottery on display.
Couldn't resist taking a quick snap of the cute doggy greeting the shoppers and also protecting the shop.
While walking leisurely down the streets, one of the signs caught my eye, and lead to a narrow alleyway to a hidden store. The signs are screaming all the right things to pique my interest-- Day Foodie! Cookies... Tea... I dragged the others to see what's inside.
This place looks fancy. It's not the kind of thing my wife is looking for, but curiosity got the better of me.
One of the decorations near the door, a large pot with decorations and a little pond. There's a funny looking puffy-eyed goldfish swimming around inside.
I like the layout of the place, it has a relaxing feel to it, and all the pieces are artfully arranged. Stairs lead to the cafe which we did not venture to since we ate a lot already beforehand. Will keep this place in mind for next time, as I like the feel of the shop. The gems you find in narrow corridors.
As we continued walking and shopping, I wanted to snap pictures for where we found certain items. Sometimes the shops look very similar though, but here at least there's some sort of address. Here we found a pretty fun item:
A decorative teacup that if you weren't paying attention makes it look like you are drinking fish when you use it.
We bought three of them.
I thought this was also interesting. Right on the doorstep people were selling lily pads! We were going to swing by after our pottery workshop visit but forgot about it. Maybe next time!
Further down (I did not record the location), this shop had some very cool mugs. I got the white coffee lettering mug. I'm sipping some tea from it right now as I type, it really feels like a quality mug.
The texture on these mugs we thought were cool, too. My wife picked up the blue cat. She thinks the cat looks a little funny.
Another shot of another section of the old street. A nice dreamy quality to it, very comfortable to walk through.
One of the major shops is this giant building with rows and rows of merchants selling a wide variety of goods from pottery, giant amethyst geodes, jade jewelry, and salt lamps.
In one of the stalls, we found a series of pretty lotus incense holders. They all look really beautiful. The one we bought was carefully packed and it survived our luggage.
This is the one we bought, in "action".
The trip was rounded out by a trip to the Shu's Pottery, the main event, where we went to do some hands-on art.
The doorway's display. I couldn't read that, but the juxtaposition of waffles and mosaic tiles is pretty funny. Also, I'm pretty sure that's a hazard. Maybe that waffle is made out of pottery?
This shows up in a few spots on the floor. It is a warning, about where they throw misbehaving tourists.
This is the art area with the pottery wheels. Last time, I came to do the pottery wheel, but this time we opted not to because for our other visitors we would not be able to get the souvenir in time (needs time to fire and glaze the pottery, etc).
Instead, we opted to participate in a mosaic tile workshop. There are several options, photo frames, coasters, even tissue boxes, but they warned that some of the options would take someone 8 hours to complete. That should have been some warning into the relative difficulty of the process. To us, we all thought this should would be pretty easy, and were pretty ambitious in terms of our choice of what we would make.
I think if you've seen my recent show and tell you know what's coming. And given the timing of when I joined Steem, it's obvious what would come straight into my mind in terms of what I wanted to make.
However, I did not want to make it obvious that I was addicted, so I said I was making the hot spring emoji:
Okay well, still was obvious, at least to my friend who I've recently shared my steemit blog with, and who I hopefully convinced to join soon as well!
For some reason, I didn't take pictures of intermediate steps in our exploration, but here is the state where we've roughly filled most of the space with glass.
In this picture, you'll see the jar of glue, part of the box containing the original tiles which are about 4-5 times larger than the pieces eventually used in the mosaic, and the scrap box containing random shards of broken glass to be used to fill space. Also on the right is the cutter that we used to break the tiles, and the tweezers used to dig through the scrap box and to help place the tiles into the mosaic.
Breaking the glass was done inside of a cup to minimize flying glass pieces, but I was periodically getting hit with shards of glass coming from my friend on the right. Ow ow ow. The large shards are not the problem though, it's the really small shards that will cut, which they warned us about. Also the trick to maximize the leverage for cutting is to place the edge of cutting portion farther way from the tile to be cut, like so:
Practical physics, yay! so yes, both the spacing between the fulcrum and the tile and where you apply pressure on the cutter should be far to maximize torque. And then cover your hand over the cup while you are cutting to prevent the flying glass. The others were finding it exhausting to cut pieces after awhile, but this is the secret. The downside though is that it gives slightly less control over the shape of the resulting pieces.
See if you can tell what is in the other mosaics. One of them smartly looked up pixel art and just drew guides to help, and it turned out really well. One of them seems to want to use their coaster as a shuriken :P. Two of them embed chinese characters:
The translation doesn't do this word justice, it's used in exclamation for example after a really nice massage.
The other is
The character for heart. (Credit for images in image itself)
Here they are up close. There is one final step which is filling in with grout. I don't have theirs, but a refresher for what mine looked like:
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And let me see if I can find one that has another light angle for fun.
It was quite exhausting, but I was very focused. Almost meditative. Probably why I forgot to take pictures of the process. Oh wait I found one:
Yikes my neck. Also, my hands were getting messy with glue residue. Afterwards, I went to their sink to rinse out the residue, when I saw this sign of motivation.
I guess that water comes from natural hot springs? Don't know.
But yeah, if you have time I would definitely recommend coming here. It is popular with tourists as well as the locals. When I did the pottery wheel last time, I remember I ended up with a cup where the opening turned out to be triangular. It turned out pretty cool, and I found a picture from awhile back.
Good as a pencil holder, it's back at my parents' house.
When we left, the sun was starting to set. The ceramic street starts to become lively at night as people get off work. There's a night market scene with some tasty snacks, and even some street performers. Jugglers, and one of them span a giant metal cube. Wish I took a quick picture of that. Was too entranced! We were in the mood for some other food, though, so we went back to the city and looked for some beef noodles, which is pretty well famous in Taipei too.
A good way to recover all that energy, right?
So yeah, my wife wants to go back in the near future. She likes the energy of the place, and she tells me that her shopping is still incomplete, as she is seeking out the perfect crystal / gemstone pieces for home. We'll be back soon, YingGe Ceramic Street! Let's tag this to the steemit world map!
!steemitworldmap 24.9489689 lat 121.3440533 long Yingge Ceramic Street D3SCR