Taiwan Archives - Page 2 of 4

Life in Taipei: this and that

I’ve been back in Taiwan for a few months now, and most of what I’ve put on the blog has been new & updated hiking content (see here). But obviously I’m not hiking every day (just once a week usually), so here’s a bunch of random photos of this & that.

Lantern display at Raohe Night Market for the Year of the Pig:

Lantern display for the year of the pig in Songshan, Taipei

My South African friend also moved to Taipei recently from Seoul, so we have a group of ex-Seoulites reassembled here now… obviously on his first weekend following a hike we went to a Korean barbecue joint and drank some soju (a low quality Korean rice liquor, awful stuff but the done thing). Aneil & Dom’s soju faces:

Doing soju shots at Korean restaurant in Zhongshan, Taipei

The hike we did that day was from Jiufen down to Houtong cat village (part of this route). Houtong’s a small former mining village which today is famous for being home to loads of cats that stroll around getting pampered and fed by tourists. This one was sat like a drunk in one of the souvenir shops:

The view from my Airbnb in Zhongshan with a nice park and a bunch of cafes downstairs. Was a great place to stay for a month:

View from my Airbnb in Zhongshan, Taipei

A few of us went to the annual Taipei gin festival, when a bunch of liquor companies have pop-up stalls in the cafes, bars and streets of the historical Dihua area. Top class drinks mixed by top class bartenders, and as a former bartender (and still being a cocktail geek) I was loving it.

Gin cocktails at the Taipei gin festival

I probably don’t post enough food pics, but when you live in Taipei you can eat so much great food for not very much money. Here’s a dumpling pitstop during the gin festival for approx 3 US dollars:

…and this is what happens when you ride a Youbike (Taipei’s awesome shared bike system) home after drinking gin all day!

More food… a recent discovery, this Thai stall in Ningxia Night Market serves the best street-style Thai food I’ve had outside Thailand:

Awesome Thai food stall in Ningxia night market

They’re not there every day, but if you’re heading to Ningxia Night Market keep an eye for this red and white sign reading 泰國小吃, they’re roughly halfway along the main row of food stalls, on the east side of the street:

Another recent discovery was this awesome whisky bar, which we stumbled upon after my mate followed a cat down an alleyway. It didn’t lead us to Narnia but we did find ourselves standing in front of a bar we’d never seen before; inside we found bottles of Game of Thrones branded whisky, but more importantly some outstanding whisky/whiskey cocktails. They mix a killer old fashioned. The place is called L’Arriere-Cour and is located just south of Xinyi Anhe Station.

Excellent old fashioned served at a Taipei whisky bar

Excellent Rob Roy cocktail served at a Taipei whisky bar

And to finish off this random jumble of photos here’s one titled ‘Rise of the Machines’ (these are a common sight at Taiwanese construction sites):

—

For more Taiwan posts see here, and see my Taiwan guide here.

Taipei hiking: a dozen views of Taipei 101

Taiwan

Apropos of nothing much, here’s a bunch of views of Taipei 101 all taken during hikes I’ve done in the 3 months since coming back to Taiwan. The weather’s generally cloudy here in spring so most of them weren’t taken on the best of days, but anyway you can see how well Taipei 101 serves as a reference point from the mountains all around the city.

This one from Kangleshan in Neihu, with Elephant Mountain prominent to the left:

View of Elephant Mountain & Taipei 101 from Kangleshan

From Jinmian Rocks, further along the Neihu ridge:

Up close, from Elephant Mountain:

These 3 are all from Neihu, starting with the awesome roof detail of Bishanyan Temple (see the hike description here):

From in front of Yuanjue Temple:

And from the top of the Liyushan trail (which goes up from Dagou Stream Park):

View of Taipei 101 from Liyushan hiking trail

This is from Shitoushan, Lion’s Head Mountain, down in Xindian:

View of Taipei 101 from the top of Lion's Head Mountain

Taipei 101 peeking up over the ridge, just visible from Battleship Rock in Beitou:

And these last 3 are from Zhinan Temple in Maokong:

—

For more Taiwan posts see here, and see my Taiwan guide here.

Life in Taipei: hiking updates

Taiwan

I recently came back to Taipei and have been getting some hiking in before the insane heat & humidity properly kicks in (already starting to do so).

Main focus has been to redo a bunch of hikes I did last time I was living here, when I didn’t have a camera and was using a beatup old iPhone 3 for most of my pics – the photography on those old hike reports was pretty crappy, so I’ve been doing them again with an actual camera. Still not a great camera, and still not a great photographer, but anyway a definite improvement on the following pages:

Neihu District: Bailusishan & Kangleshan

Battleship Rock

Lion’s Head Mountain

Elephant Mountain

Neihu Ridge & Bishan Temple

…plus a new page for Jinmian Rocks:

A few of us also went and hiked from Jiufen to Houtong, but the photos on that page were already ok as I’d used my iPad last time.

In the next few weeks I’m planning to hike to Yinhe Cave Temple again by a new route, Teapot Mountain out near Jiufen, and finally climb Yangmingshan (highest in Taipei) which I’ve somehow never got round to yet. Update: done! Teapot Mountain here, Yangmingshan here

—

For more Taiwan posts see here, and see my Taiwan guide here.

Life in Taipei: the old city wall

Architecture, History, Taiwan

Beimen, the North Gate of the old Taipei city wall

Taipei was only founded in the late 1800s when Taiwan was part of the Qing Empire, and the city walls were pulled down a short time later in the early 1900s when Taiwan was part of the Japanese Empire. The Japanese administration did this to make way for the wide boulevards which are still there today, but they left 4 of the original 5 gates standing.

Those 5 gates were Beimen (North Gate), Ximen (West Gate), Dongmen (East Gate), Nanmen (South Gate) and Xiaonanmen (Little South Gate). Ximen was the gate that fell victim to Japan’s road building, while Beimen is the only one still standing in its original form today – the others were redesigned during Chiang Kai Shek’s dictatorship in the same style as the National Palace Museum.

Beimen

If you’re curious to see a piece of the old Taipei city wall, Beimen is definitely the one to check out – both because it’s the only original gate, and also because it’s the only one not standing in the middle of a major road. A main road still passes right in front of it, but the area immediately around the gate itself is a reasonably pleasant pedestrian space:

North Gate is a short walk from Beimen Station (the station being named for the gate) and also easily walkable from Taipei Main Station.

Here’s an old-school Japanese postcard showing Beimen back in the day.

Ximen

Although the gate is long gone, Ximen is one of the main shopping & entertainment districts in the city and a place that most visitors will either stay in or at least spend an afternoon or evening hanging out in. This small model of the gate is on the east side of the main intersection above the station:

While over on the southwest side of the same intersection (near exit 1) there’s this scale model of the Taipei city wall with its 5 gates:

Scale model in Ximen of the old Taipei city walls

As well as this random statue of a Qing dynasty dude clutching a coffee:

Dongmen, Nanmen, and Xiaonanmen

The other 3 gates stand in the middle of busy roads and so aren’t really places to linger. They were remodelled by Chiang Kai Shek in the 1950s to look like this:

The south & east gates are both a short walk from Liberty Square though (where Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall is located) so if you’re interested you can easily go for a quick look when you visit Liberty Square. Dongmen stands in the roundabout at the northwest corner of Liberty Square, while Nanmen is just round the corner from the southwest corner of the square and just over the road from exit 7 of Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall Station.

Dongmen is just north of this big white gate at the western end of Liberty Square:

Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall in Liberty Square, Taipei

Xiaonanmen, like Beimen, has a subway station named after it; the gate’s about 100m west of exit 1 of Xiaonanmen Station. There isn’t much else of interest in the immediate vicinity though, so there’s little reason to head to Xiaonanmen unless (like me) you’re a nerd and want to go see all the gates.

Note that there’s also a subway station called Dongmen Station, but it isn’t very close to the East Gate – it’s actually named for Dongmen Market, which historically was the market beyond the East Gate hence the name (it’s a 15-minute walk from Dongmen Station to the gate).

—

For more of my Taiwan posts see here, and see my Taiwan guide here. For more detailed info on Taipei’s gates see this great post

Life in Taipei: Stumpy the Lizard

Taiwan, Wildlife

Fucking bugs. Fucking cockroaches, fucking flies, and fucking, fucking, fucking mosquitoes; one thing you’re always going to have to put up with if you go live in a tropical climate is all the damn bugs.

If you’re in Korea or Japan then at least it’s only a summer thing, the colder winter months being nice and bug-free (doesn’t seem to apply in China though – even in the brutal cold of a Beijing winter I encountered the odd roach); but if you’re in the tropics, they’re ever-present and they’re something you just have to deal with – and they’re all massive to boot.

This is also the case in Taipei – though it’s technically sub-tropical, lying just outside the tropics (the Tropic of Cancer runs across the middle of Taiwan), and does cool down for a couple of months in winter, it feels tropical most of the time and has some serious bugs.

One particular room I rented for a couple of months was brutal – monster cockroaches would sometimes pop out of the drains or suddenly appear running up the wall, and the daily battle with the mosquitoes was an exhausting endeavour; just as you’re drifting off, that high-pitched buzz whines somewhere near your ear, or you feel one landing gently on your nose, so you spring to action, hit the lights, and spend the next 30 minutes playing wack-a-mozz.

Thankfully we do have some allies in this struggle – all those insects provide plenty of sustenance for Taiwan’s spiders and lizards.

Now, if you’re one of those who hates spiders and lumps them in with all the other critters, I have to warn you – Taiwan has some pretty impressive arachnids, especially out in the hills:

A large orb spider in the Jiufen / Houtong area — Came across this beauty while hiking near Jiufen

Never saw anything that big in the city though! As for me, I don’t hate spiders at all, so I’d always welcome a couple of resident spiders to do pest control on all the little flying bastards.

Unfortunately I didn’t get any spiders in that insect-infested building for some reason, but I did get another even more useful insect hunter – a little house gecko set up shop behind my fridge.

It scared the shit out of me first time I saw it – I’d just got into bed when I noticed a dark shape wriggling up the wall, differentiated by the faint glow of the LEDs in the room. I jumped up and hit the lights, then realised it was a gecko – one of the good guys. I figured a gecko in the room would mean fewer insects in the room, and left it to it.

And so this little lizard took up residence behind my fridge (they like the heat back there apparently), emerging at night to eat the mosquitoes that were trying to eat me. A handy little symbiotic relationship… or so I thought.

The arrangement lasted for a week or so, until I saw the mother of all cockroaches emerge from and then scuttle back under the fridge; it was a real monster, like one of the CGI aliens from the movie Starship Troopers (only a slight exaggeration). Pulling the fridge out from the wall, I found a whole cockroach party going under there, the one huge one along with a bunch of smaller ones – all feasting on a veritable banquet of gecko shit. Of course.

Should’ve thought of that really – the gecko eats the mosquitoes, but obviously some of that biomass has to come out again, and a pile of lizard droppings is a nice easy feed for the roaches.

Should’ve thought of it, but didn’t – and now my reptilian friend had to go.

I didn’t want to kill it, but catching a lizard is very tricky indeed, as I soon discovered. There I was at 2am with an empty take out container in one hand and a piece of packaging cardboard in the other, hot & bothered and sweating profusely as I tried and failed to catch the little bastard. It was just too quick and too alert to what I was up to, and had a couple of handy escape tricks up its sleeve – one being to take a flying leap out from the wall, launching itself a surprising distance across the room to escape my clutches. This was something I had no idea they could do, and it makes them extremely difficult to trap; but the second trick I was already aware of – that of severing and dropping their own tail.

They usually do this when a bird grabs them by the tail, but although I never touched its tail, it still came off – they have a set of muscles at the base of the tail they can contract in emergencies to sever it, something they do in life or death situations.

This wasn’t a life or death situation, but the poor little thing wasn’t to know that and just as it seemed I was about to finally catch it, pop! off came the tail. This actually surprised me enough that I hesitated for the fraction of a second that allowed it to escape yet again.

So now I had a gecko tail writhing around on the floor (the muscles continue spasming for a while after the tail is dropped), and an amputee lizard hiding under the bed… this went on and on for ages, furniture was pulled and shunted around, I sweated and cursed, and I completely failed to catch it – the contest finally ended with it slipping out under the door and running off down the hallway.

After that I kept seeing it hanging out in the stairwell of the building (this was your typical older Taiwanese residential building, with a bunch of apartments off a dingy central stairwell), easily identifiable by its stump of a tail – hence the name I gave it, Stumpy.

I have no idea if Stumpy was male or female, but I was glad it was living out in the stairwell, hopefully filling its boots with mosquitoes. I felt bad about the stump, about having scared it badly enough to drop its tail, but they do eventually grow back. And I hope Stumpy is still there, thriving, with a fully formed tail.

For more Taiwan posts see here, and see my Taiwan guide here

Photo credit: Robin Corps, used under Creative Commons

Life in Taipei: the Taiwan Receipt Lottery

Taiwan

If you’re travelling in Taiwan, you may notice that shop staff seem particularly keen for you to take your receipt; you may even notice members of public stooping to scoop up discarded receipts from the floor.

The reason is the rows of digits printed near the top, just above the date:

Every time you make a purchase in Taiwan, you’re actually getting a free ticket for the Taiwan receipt lottery (officially, the Uniform Invoice Lottery, 統一發票, tongyi fapiao); those digits on the receipt are your numbers. The draw is held bi-monthly, and prizes range from 200 NTD (around 6 US dollars) for matching 3 digits, up to a fairly whopping 10,000,000 NTD (over 300,000 US dollars) for an exact match on the grand prize number.

This was all started in the 1950s as a way of ensuring businesses had to run everything through the tills properly and thus report their taxes properly (something they were apparently not doing previously!)

It’s still going to this day, so it must be considered that paying out the prize money is less of a hit than chasing unpaid sales taxes, though it seems unlikely a company could fiddle the books so easily these days.

A 7-Eleven store in Taiwan — A horde of Chinese tourists outside a 7-Eleven in Jiufen. They probably all discarded their receipts… and perhaps missed out on some prize money

Anyway, as a visitor you have two options – ignore the whole thing and throw your receipts away, or keep them all and have a go at playing!

If you choose not to bother, try to put your receipts in the charity boxes (where available) so any winnings go to a good cause; otherwise, rather than binning them just leave them out for someone to easily take.

If you do decide to give it a go, the draw for the Taiwan receipt lottery is held on the 25th of the month after the end of each 2-month period e.g. receipts from January & February enter the draw on 25th March. You can check the results here (official page, English option at bottom-right) and here (English-language expat site); due to the schedule, unless you’re staying for a fairly lengthy visit you’ll likely have already left Taiwan by the time of the draw. Small prizes can be redeemed at a post office in Taiwan, while for larger ones you have to go to the bank; you’re obviously not going to fly back to Taiwan to redeem a 200 NTD prize… a 10,000,000 NTD prize, on the other hand, and you’re flying first class!

So, how much does one usually win? Well, in my last spell in Taiwan I was there for 10 months and played 6 times (4 full periods and 2 halves); I averaged one 200 NTD prize per 2-month period. That’ll buy you a good bowl of ramen, or a few rounds of night market treats; not to be sniffed at, but then is it worth the hassle of hanging on to all those receipts and the time you spend going through them all to check if you won?

To be honest, not really! But it’s a quirky little facet of life in Taiwan you could try, and you never know – you might just hit the jackpot…

Have you tried the Taiwan receipt lottery? Win anything?! Leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

For more posts on Taipei, click here

For my guide to hiking in Taipei, click here

For my Taiwan overland travel guide, click here