Month: March 2007

Taipei, Part 2

The National Palace Museum (national as in China, so there’s a lot of stuff there) was great, but I discovered that the breezy, empty transportation system of mid-weekdays turns into a crowded, slow, snarled mess on weekends. After waiting for around an hour to catch any bus, I curtailed my schedule for today.

No pictures in the museum, of course.

I’m coming down with something (well, I was yesterday) so I’m going to try to take it easy tonight, going out to get a light dinner at the most. And maybe tomorrow. I’ll at least try to see Danshui though; if I stick to the MRT the traffic problem will stay manageable, I think. I’ll try to leave around 5 p.m. tomorrow for the airport, so that should give me good time for a lazy morning, checking out barely on time, and zipping off to the shore.

Taipei, Part 1.5

Last evening, I left off after a streetside dinner which had left me wanting more. So, I got more. I went out to Din Tai Fung, which is a world-famous (among snobby food critics, anyway) place specializing in xiaolongbao (Shanghainese-style soup dumplings). It was what it was cracked up to be.

Also, the lantern festival (which actually starts today) was, for some reason, even more fun at night. My pictures probably didn’t come out well though.

Today, I’m going to the National Palace Museum, and perhaps one of CKS’s old official residences near the corresponding MRT station, before probably paying a return visit to the food court in the basement of Taipei 101. Tomorrow, I’ll be trying to get a bit outside of the city, either toward the hot springs at Beitou or the mouth of the river on the Strait at Danshui.

Taipei, part 1

Here I am in Taipei, my feet destroyed by underestimating the scale of some guidebook maps. My journey was about par for the course; minor delays, unexpected niceties of flying in Asia, and so on.

At the airport my check-in took about 25 minutes—with no line—because “something was wrong.” I was half-expecting to find myself extraordinarily rendered, but it seems that “something” was taken care of. The flight was barely over an hour and a third on a very empty, very new EVA Airwarys Boeing 777-300ER, in their “Premium Economy cabin” (which they don’t mind if you sit in with an Economy ticket on short-haul flights). I can see why they didn’t mind—there couldn’t have been more than 60 people or so on the plane. I wonder why?

EVA seems to have its own (or nearly its own) little terminal at TPE. Immigration was surprisingly quick, even for non-citizens, but I guess that happens when you have just 60 people coming off a wide-body jet. After wandering around the airport, finding an ATM and a bus company, nothing exciting happened until I arrived at the Taipei train station… around midnight, requiring a painfully expensive roaming call to keep the hostel’s doors open.

I’m in the Happy Family Hostel III, a decidedly basic place with a nice owner. Maybe I’ll remember to take a picture or two of my quarters before leaving.

Today I’ve seen Taipei 101, the Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Halls, the 2-28 Peace Park, City Hall and its Discovery Center… hmm… lots of big streets… OK, I don’t remember everything. Maybe my pictures do. I’ll try to upload some from here.

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Waxing Filipinosophical

I’m thinking very philosophically (blog-speak for I haven’t even started to think about packing for a flight in a few hours) today. This time I’ll carry a notebook (paper) and take it out on it instead of the blog, but for now you’re stuck with a few fragments from the last couple weeks. I’d checked my bag (all of it) three times in a row, thanks to the Filipino implementation of the “liquids or gels” rule (which is coming to Hong Kong in March, sadly).

I really got a kick, in an Ugly American kind of way, out of the mark left by the USA on the Philippines. That most Filipino of conveyances, the incomparable jeepney, was born from American jeeps; bus drivers and passengers in the north sing along to country music, from cover bands with perfect accents. Firearms are rampant—America! In the parts of the country we visited, the USA gets a better reception than in many places it’s been: compared to the Spanish and the Japanese, US occupation forces came out smelling like roses. Peso bills are the same size as dollar bills. We saw parking spaces at Benguet State reserved for operatives of “Future Farmers of the Philippines.” I could go on.

The Spanish mark, of course, is distinct too, and it’s maybe the combination of these that really got to me. What I think of as Latin American is, in part, really Iberian Colonial—it’s in the Philippines, too. (Literally) loud, public Catholicism (now with competition from charismatic and evangelical sects), some of the food… familiar in a comforting way to me.

Unfortunately, these thoughts aren’t very useful to me when I was planning to leave for the airport at 6 p.m., or maybe even go a little early and try to take care of some business at airline reservations counters. It’s 4:45 p.m. now; time to pack.