To us five years from now. I wonder if you still remember how the December wind in Tongxiao felt—dry, smelling faintly of tea and old earth—and how we spent half the trip arguing over the GPS only to find that the best way to move was to simply stop moving entirely.
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Four things we will still remember in five years
The Red Brick Friction. The way the smooth, worn red bricks of the courtyard felt under our slippers, a tactile reminder that this Sanheyuan had seen a century of footsteps before we arrived with our loud laughter and mismatched luggage.
The Room Lottery. That absurd moment we realized one of us was in an industrial-style concrete box while another was essentially in Bali, all within the same walls of Naizhishima Inn, as if the house itself couldn't decide which decade it wanted to belong to.
The Steam Curtain. The thick, white fog of the hot pot dinner that erased everyone's faces for a moment, leaving only the sound of chopsticks clinking and the shared, unspoken agreement that we were never leaving this table.
The 3 AM Mahjong Echo. The rhythmic click-clack of tiles echoing through the quiet neighborhood, a sound that felt like a secret code we were broadcasting to the rest of Miaoli, daring the silence to break us.
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When opened five years later
When we open this memory five years later, I suspect the specific taste of that morning porridge—salty, warm, and unapologetically simple—will be the first thing to return, though the exact arguments we had over the Switch game will have dissolved into a vague, golden blur. We might forget the exact number of steps from Baishatun Station, but I think we'll remember the way the light hit the courtyard at 7 AM, a pale, winter gold that made the whole place feel less like a rental and more like a portable home we had collectively carried with us from the city, a space where the tension between the old architecture and our modern chaos somehow found a quiet resolution.
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A single, forgotten slipper left by the red brick step.
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- Bring a deck of cards; the Mahjong table is great, but the stakes are higher with cards.
- Walk to Gongtian Temple early; the morning air is the only thing that clears the hot pot fog.