Downtown, with Taipei 101 on the skyline
Closer to 101.
An unexpected angel. It’s mostly Buddhist here; I saw many Buddhist monks and a few nuns, but no other signs of Christianity except that in the hotel room there was both a New Testament and a Teachings of the Buddha.
The Formosan Bear is, unofficially, the national animal of Taiwan (of old called Formosa Isle).
Taipei Main Station. I caught the High Speed Railway from here. Recommended.
The Most Important Store. Only very recently is it legal to buy a Harley in Taiwan. Until late, large displacement motorcycles were banned by law.
2 comments:
When Dad was stationed on Okinawa, he and Mom went to Taipei when she came to visit him. They said that the national museum was amazing, and liked the city. (They also went to Japan. Mom got stared at, because she had very dark red hair.)
This was in 1970, so to see the full sequence of great Chinese art of the Imperial Period, you had to go to Taiwan.
LittleRed1
As you might imagine, mega-cities are not my ideal environment. All the same, I've traveled through enough of them to have the sense of how to do it. The high speed rail line was great. Uber worked perfectly well also, even with the language difference since you plug in your intended destination in the app's internal mapping software and thus never need to explain it to your driver. I have a little Mandarin (really Hangzhounese, but it's very close) from my time living on the mainland, and I can read a very little 中文 as well, although that was complicated because the Taiwanese use traditional rather than the simplified characters I once knew better than now anyway.
That part was a reasonably pleasing challenge, but I was not too sorry to fly away from the gigantic crowds and busy streets. I would have liked to have had time to rent a motorcycle and ride up into the mountains, which are stunning: it has a central/eastern mountain chain with hundreds of peaks that near or surpass 10,000 feet. I understand the waterfalls up there are amazing.
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