Taiwhat?

What the hell am I looking at? (Taipei Main Station)

A final anthology of more unusual/daft things I've witnessed with my eyes in Taiwan.

The Great Museum-Off

Some experienced travellers claim you can't gain a true understanding of the world's myriad peoples by visiting museums, and that only by walking the streets and interacting with the locals will you really be able to appreciate foreign cultures.

But a lot of the time, the locals don't know anything and the streets are too strewn with innuendo to be of any cultural value. That's why sometimes, to truly appreciate a civilisation, you do need to visit a sterile museum and look at endless identical vases behind glass, viewed through the gaps in a Japanese crowd.

Shilin slips

Another uninformed, insightless wander through another district of Taipei, on the lookout for 'hilarious' shop names and letting the real beauty of the world slip by.

This will be the last of these. At least, until I see the next Boloking.

Master of the Universe

After my day trip to Mars, I ventured out further into the cosmos with a visit to the Taipei Astronomical Museum.

You have to admire my desperate efforts to impose a narrative structure on my life, as a way to remedy the uncertain and random nature of existence. Maybe 'admire' is the wrong word...

Nangang nonos

I've moved to Nangang (East Taipei) to keep life artifically interesting. Here are some local strange shop names.

Taipei typos

Here's a project that's been ongoing since I arrived in the Far East, and will doubtless continue until I leave, or until Asian retailers stop giving their stores such amusing names.

HA HA HA! They can't even speak English properly, and occasionally make understandable mistakes that could be tenuously misinterpreted to mean something vaguely rude or otherwise inappropriate! It's as if English isn't even their native language and they're forced to adopt it to survive in international markets! The idiots!!!

Oh well, it's still funny. Here are some of the best I've found around town. More to definitely come soon.

End of the line

Another pleasant day out, this time taking the Taipei Rapid Transit System TO THE LIMIT, for an EXTREME adventure ON THE EDGE...

What that means is I went all the way up the red line of the metro (I live down near the bottom of the green line by Dapinglin (大坪林), for any celeb stalking fans out there).

Yeah, I know there was a time when I travelled 6,000 miles in a day, but in this weird place I'm too scared of what lies beyond to risk venturing outside of the city. Here may literally be dragons, after all. Or at the very least, a lengthy and frustrating visa application process.

Freath of bresh air

You could say that I'm the last person who needs to take time out to smell the lotuses, considering the near-nonexistent stresses of my life these days.

My biggest problems of late have been things like having too much freedom to travel, feeling guilty about eating out cheaply and worrying that seeing the pyramids might raise my tourism standards to impractical heights. I tell you, any more of this shit and I'm going to snap.

Fortunately for us all, it seems Taipei was hastily built around mountains and forests that refused to budge in the face of capitalism, so there's lots of green here. Here is some of it.

Taipei Temple Tour (Twenty-Ten)

'Buddhists believe that the body is a temple. They are wrong, of course. The temple is a part of the body. On the side of the head. It's an easy mistake to make, but one you'd think that one of the world's millions of Buddhists would have spotted by now.'

- Stewart Lee, Fist of Fun

With my tatty notebook, dodgy Egyptian camera and MRT map dropped into my unrealistically deep pockets along with the rest of the essentials, I was ready to embark on a breakneck tour of all the major temples in Taipei City today - until it was pointed out to me just how tedious this would be.

But that's okay, because I'm an ignorant Westerner visiting China (not actually China, but what do I know?) So when I say 'temple' I don't actually mean a sacred building where the public go to worship the Jade Emperor and co. and light joss paper. Nah, I mean any Oriental-looking building, preferably red, with paintings on the outside and those funny sloping roofs. That's temple enough for me. Even if it isn't temple at all.

A childish day out

Dave W pretends he's unenthused, even though he genuinely didn't sleep a wink last night (wow, you can't tell!) because he was so excited about going to the zoo.
He is twenty-five years old

While Egypt's cities were essentially large-scale safari parks - where you'd see camels, donkeys, goats, chickens, dogs and so many cats taking their chances on the mental roads - local wildlife has been lacking since I got to Taiwan. I haven't seen one pigeon, and even the stray cats walk politely alongside humans as if they're being taken for a walk.

This place is mental in more subtle ways.

Twenty-five

Luckily, Taipei Zoo is on hand for all my zoophile needs (in the bibliophile sense rather than the other one - though there's definitely a stigma attached to a fully-grown man going to the zoo by himself, so I didn't). It was bizarrely cheap too. If there's one thing I like more than seeing animals shuffle around uncomfortably in incorrect and restricted environments, it's enjoying a great, childish day out for the equivalent of 65p. 65p!!!

101: thing to do in Taipei

After tourism overload in Egypt, I've been taking things pretty easy in Taiwan over the first week - unless you count the relentless food tourism (Zào Jūn be praised).

That's right - I might be suffering from the cold like the rest of you idiots now (especially after the unreasonable heat of the last three months ruined my durability), but at least I'm eating better food than you! And I wonder why nobody reads this. You're alright really.