The Making of an Ordinary Woman | Fuzhong Street — The Baseball Team That Came to Cheer

Her first tour as a licensed guide is going badly. Chen Jia-ling has taken her client through the Martial Temple and fumbled it, and she brings him here for a plate of sliced tomato with the ginger-soy-plum dip that southerners eat it with, mostly to buy herself time. Then Tsai Yung-sen arrives with an entire high school baseball team and they start shouting her name.

The joke underneath it is geographic: the school is more than fifty kilometres away. He drove them.

The shop is called "under the stone lion", and the stone lion is real. Twenty metres west stands the Panggong stone archway of 1777, four granite pillars socketed into carved stone lion bases, the ceremonial gate of the Confucius Temple precinct. The shop took its name from the thing it sits under.

Inside there is a restored block-ice shaver standing in the open beside the counter, and seasonal fruit stacked in glass cases. Seating is a handful of outdoor tables under oversized umbrellas. Fuzhong Street is closed to cars, so the sound here is the temple side of Nanmen Road rather than traffic — which is why a scene built on people shouting works in it.

It is a private ice shop, roughly ten to seven. Buy a bowl of ice or the tomato plate. Do not photograph it and leave.

Order the tomato plate specifically. It arrives sliced, with a saucer of dark dipping sauce that tastes of ginger, soy and preserved plum all at once, and it is the single most southern thing you can eat sitting down. She ordered it because she had run out of things to say. It is better than that makes it sound.

Location data: Tainan City Government tourism and the official filming location map. The business trades as 石獅下鮮果冰城.