My Taiwan trip
Well, the past weekend had glorious weather for diving, but I wasn’t able to get into the water. Instead, I hopped on a plane on Thursday nught and one hour later I was in Taiwan for the weekend. It was my first time to visit the country, and it is a very interesting country. I probably would only go back if I was going with a native speaker (Cecky, please take note!) - knowledge of the language is very important if you are to fully appreciate your time there as a solo traveller. I had very similar feelings about my trip to Beijing last year.
Stayed at the Fortuna Hostel in Taipei, which I can recommend to anyone who is looking for an inexpensive place to stay while they are travelling around. It’s not bang in the centre of town, but has pretty good public transport links to get anywhere in the city. It’s about a minute’s walk from Song Shan train station (not to be confused with Zhongshan, or any of the other similar sounding places!), and 10 minutes walk to Yongchun MRT station. Incidentally, the MRT system is a great way to get around Taipei, and should be used by everyone who visit the city. The hostel is run by a British guy called Chris, and it has no curfew or anything like that. You get your own key to the place and so can come and go as you please.
Not a huge number of people know this, but Taipei is home to the world’s tallest building. Taipei 101 stands at 514m tall, and was designed to look like bamboo sticks pointing upward towards the sky. It’s got a huge shopping centre for the first 5 floors and then for NT$350 (about a fiver) you can take the lift up to the 89th floor. I have to say that the lift is hella-quick; 89 floors inside about 20 seconds is very impressive. The views from the top are pretty stunning too, especially on a sunny day. You can see a couple of the views below but you really can’t get an idea of how high up you are.
I also visited the 228 Memorial Museum, which is pretty close to the main train station in Taipei. It’s not one of the most exciting places in Taipei to visit, but I would say it’s one of those places you should visit during your stay in Taiwan. The guide seemed very happy to see a foreigner visit the museum and she talked for ages about the country and about what had happened in the buildup to the events of February 28th, 1947. What I thought would be a 30-45minute trip ended up lasting about 2 and a half hours! At the end the guide asked me if I wanted to see the exhibition in the basement that some university students were putting on. I thought “What’s another 20 minutes?!” and agreed. I’m glad I did too. The exhibition didn’t look like it had too many visitors and the 2 students who were there at the time seemed very pleased to have a visitor, and a western one, at that. The work they had done was very good, ranging from animations made from shredded paper (much more interesting than it sounds), to someone’s fractal pictures created from their diving photos. And there was also some paintings taken from a girl’s trip to England; the student wasn’t there at the time but the 2 who were got very excited when I told them one of the places was close to where I come from (York). They asked for photos and gave me their business cards and it felt really rewarding to have seen their work. As anyone who knows me knows, I have absolutely no artistic ability whatsover, so I have a lot of respect for people with that sort of creativity.
I also visited the National Palace Museum, which I should note is under renovations until December 2006. Quite a few of the exhibits were closed but there was still a huge amount to see. To be honest, there was almost too much to see. You can only look at pottery and earthenware for so long before it all starts to blend into one. I do like looking around museums and taking in the culture, but this got to be a bit too much for me and you end up just looking blankly at the works and not taking them in with the focus that they deserve. A place which was more interesting to me was the Chiang Kai Shek memorial. This huge place in the centre of town also holds the Taiwan National Theatre and is quite a sight. Beyond an imposing white gated entrance is a vast square with the theatre on both sides and the memorial in front of you. The memorial itself is a large bronze (?) statue of Chiang Kai Shek sitting down in a marble walled room. The ceiling was something to behold too, and I managed to get a fairly decent picture of it all below.
I also went to Danshui for part of a day, which is a nice break for the hustle and bustle of the big city (you can tell I live in a village in Okinawa - very inaka!). All was going well until I managed to pull a muscle in my foot which made me much less mobile than I would have liked, and I spent the rest of my trip hobbling around in a bit of pain. It’s getting better now but is still just a little bit tender.
So that’s a very brief report about my trip. A few more photos will be posted in my gallery, so tootle over and have a look if you feel so inclined. As always, questions and comments are appreciated. The weather is so good this week - I have to get into the water soon!
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