by Steffi Liu
Does the name sound gloomy? Are you feeling scared? Well don’t be. No one is practicing spells or eating kids here. It’s a restaurant, but it’s a bit more than your average garden-variety eatery. Here you can also have alcoholic drinks, listen to some groovy music, and even play games. The Witch House is actually a cultural coffee-shop-bar-restaurant kinda thing. When you first step in, you’ll see lots of witch-related decorations, including broomsticks and hats. Beware when sitting down, because you might find yourself blushing up to your ears when you spot colorful women’s underwear hanging on the back of the seats. And take a good look at the wording on the menu before you attempt to order. The staff, with their rather grotesque sense of humor, have substituted words for the names of food that imply things both wicked and funny. You can still tell what the entrees are, though it could take some time to figure them out, and they can be a mouthful to pronounce! The list of main dishes, for example, begins with 酒池肉林 from a Chinese idiom meaning indulgence in pleasure or being voluptuous. They use it here because they are going to serve you really good food and you can just relax and enjoy it. The beer Budweiser is translated into Chinese in a way that the English sound is kept, but the words now refer to a lustful father(爸歪色). One strongly recommended drink, for women only, is the “menstrual ice tea,” which is the combination of fruit tea and lime wine, and is said to help the bloodstream. In addition to the menu, there are also some games—again, for women only. The first one is the push-up challenge: any woman who can do 10 push-ups without dropping right on the floor will get a discount of 20% in honor of her physical ability. Another challenge is arm-wrestling between the customer and any waitress of your choice. If you win, you will get free food, like popcorn, but if you lose you have to pay a penalty of 80 dollars! It seems quite exciting, but be warned that the waitresses there are not a bunch of weak, wimpy girls. The Witch House also has live band performances every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. Performers may not be super famous pop-stars but they still have great music that is direct and alternative. And on the third Monday of every month, anyone who has any pretense of musical talent has a chance to go onstage and show the crowd what they’ve got! In addition to music, there is also a Taiwanese puppet show on the second Monday night of every month, guaranteed to be unique and funny. For all the hilarity and insanity, the theme of Witch House is feminism, and it is not named this way just to be cool. Upon hearing the word witch, most people tend to conjure up in their minds images of old, ugly, fat women. Yet it could be an over-distorted myth—a witch can be so much more than that. “Witch” here depicts women who are filled with energy and confidence about their own faith or value, regardless of pressures from mainstream society. They are not necessarily fat or thin, ugly or pretty. “Witch” is here a symbol of being in charge of oneself, and taking a more liberal attitude toward both music and life. When a girl just listens to her heart and wants to be whoever she really is, she too is like a witch in some way. For their performance schedule just email them at: [email protected] a
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
|