Day 184: Making the Most of It

With only one full day in Taipei, I wanted to squeeze in what I could. I started by visiting the site shared by the National Democracy Hall, Concert Hall and Theater since they were just down the street from my hostel. The traditional architecture of the buildings adds a nice touch, and it's interesting comparing them to similar architecture I've seen in Korea and Hong Kong. I find the little characters on the roof edges an especially interesting shared feature. They mark official buildings, and the number of figures on the roof reflects the importance of the building's function. The most obvious difference with the Taiwanese buildings is the colours. Most of the temples and other traditional buildings I've seen have the roof tiles painted dark colours (usually black), but in Taipei everything seems to be painted up in orange, green, blue and violet. The buildings also have lots of very colourful carvings and ornamentation on them which really catches your eye.

One of the major things I wanted to visit was the National Palace Museum. It contains a lot of objects from the Forbidden City, and is probably the most complete collection of Chinese art and artifacts in the world. I really liked some of the artwork, especially the long painted scrolls of sweeping landscape scenes and some of the elaborate jade carvings, but in general it was a lot of furniture, jade, small bronzework and pottery, none of which I really have the background to appreciate.

I visited a few other temples in the afternoon. I wasn't really hunting them out, but they do stand out more than anything else, and look more interesting. The most interesting of the places I visited were the Xingtian Temple and the Taipei Confucius Temple. The Confucius Temple, in addition to the temple itself, had small exhibits through the surrounding buildings talking about Confucius and his teachings. There was also a school band practicing on the grounds, and while they weren't terribly good it was interesting to see all the differences in instruments to what our bands have.

My final stop was to check out some of the Taipei night markets. There are many different ones throughout the city, each with their own focuses. I found them to be much less touristy than the Hong Kong ones, and were a mix of clothing, shoes, electronics, food with some random carnivalish games thrown in. I found a lot of the street food smelled pretty terrible, and I wasn't going to take any risks when I had to get up early for another plane, so I stuck to things that weren't quite so exotic.

In general the city seemed less built up than any of the other big cities in Asia I've been to, but that could also just be that I didn't see enough of it to get a good feel. The temperature was still hot, but I found it to be much more comfortable than Hong Kong was just because of the lower humidity. My biggest complaint was things relating to getting around. Street signs were confusing and misleading and the huge number of scooters zipping around combined with poor/no sidewalks made walking a pain at times, but again, it might just be that I never had time to adjust properly. On the plus side, Taipei is the cheapest city I've been to so far (that won't last long), with none of my meals costing more than $5 CDN, and often considerably less.

Day 183: Taipei

Another plane ride over with. I must say though, Hong Kong International Airport has a rather nice departures wing. My flight this time wasn't until noon, so I could get up at a reasonable time and not frantically rush to the airport.

The ride into Taipei from the airport was a fairly lengthy bus ride, followed by another, much shorter bus. The city bus at the end was reporting stops out of sync with where it actually was, so I got off at the wrong stop which was a bit troublesome since the instructions I was given were landmark based ("go towards the Starbucks on your left...") assuming I was beginning at a place I wasn't. I still managed to find the place pretty quickly, which was good because there is no actual staff at the hostel and I had to be let in by one of the people that run it who was waiting for me. I had estimated in my correspondence with them that I'd show up around 4:00 and in the end it was like 4:15, so it wasn't too awful. The hostel I'm in is actually pretty amazing. It's brand new, having only been open for a month, and it's sparkling. There's a dorm (where I am), and two private double-rooms, but the only people staying here, at least for tonight, are me and one girl in one of the private rooms, so I have the dorm to myself. The place has two very modern washrooms, its own kitchen, and laundry (unfortunately I just washed everything before leaving Hong Kong). It's just another reason to be disappointed I have such a short time here.

I didn't want to do anything too wild tonight, so I just explored the neighborhood a bit and scrounged a dinner from a mix of street vendors. Tomorrow I'm going to squeeze in as much as I can, but I'm focusing on a few things in particular that interest me. I've found that with all these big cities, especially when you have a limited time, the most interesting thing to do is to check out the places that make the city special or give it its character. My flight out of Taiwan on Wednesday is at 8am (ugh) so I'll probably need to go to bed early or just spend another day exhausted.