Charles and Christy’s Weblog

On Wednesday night, I took a guided “Taipei Nights” tour. We started by heading to Taipei 101, the disputed tallest building in the world. It’s designed was inspired by a bamboo plant. We didn’t have time to go to the top but the lower floors are filled with high-end stores (Dolce and Gabana, Prada, etc.) and it is centered right in a huge shopping district. From Taipei 101, we went to eat dinner at a Mongolian BBQ restaurant. Our guide told us that Mongolian BBQ actually started in Taiwan. When Chiang Kai-shek fled China with his closest followers, they were no longer elite people and had to start businesses. Supposedly, a lot of their effort focused on starting restaurants representing all of the different regions in China and Mongolia, including Mongolian BBQ. After dinner, we visited the oldest temple in Taipei, Lungshan Temple , a combination Bhuddist/Taoist temple. It was quite busy and beautiful, painted brightly and held up by carved stone columns. In all of my trips to Asia, this was my favorite temple that I’ve visited.  Our tour guide told us the significance of many of the gods (including one specifically to promote success in exams and one to help couple have boy babies) and we learned about how the people in the temple get answers from god to important questions.  From the temple we walked to another night market.  This market was much like the one I visited the night before except that it had a specialization in snakes.  The Taiwanese people believe that drinking snake blood or eating snake helps with skin problems.  Killing snakes has recently been made illegal but is still done in a few places, like this market.  We were told not to take pictures of the storefronts with the snakes because the Taiwanese mafia might come after us.  After finishing our walk through the market, which also included many foot massage parlors (I considered stopping), we were taken back to the hotel.

It is so hot here… and I hear it’s hot like this all year round. Accordingly, the Taiwanese people do all of their shopping at night. There are night markets all over the place, in alleys and plazas. Tonight, I went to one of the biggest ones and had my first experience on their public transit system (quite nice and easy to navigate). I was brave and bought a Chinese dumpling (love them!) and a mango bubble tea from a stand at the market. This is slightly risky here because health and safety practices are not as strict as they are at home. Then, I walked through a collection of stalls selling clothes, shoes, sunglasses, belts, and toys though I didn’t buy anything. The sidewalks were packed with people and the roads are packed with people on scooters. While it was nice to get out and see some of Taiwan, I am happy to be back in my air conditioned hotel room now preparing for my talk tomorrow.

After I received my luggage and changed, I decided to head outside my hotel to look for lunch.  There is a lot of pedestrian traffic in the neighborhood, probably because my hotel is right across from a huge train station.  It was very hot and humid outside and, in general, didn’t smell very good.  I found a shopping center which had a food court kind of like the ones I liked in Japan… here, there seems to be a lot more fried food and a lot less fresh food.  Sadly, there was also a KFC and McDonald’s in the building.  I walked over to the train station hoping to find some simple food stands but instead found stall after stall of inexpensive clothes and shoes… racks and racks of shirts for less than $3.00 US.  I finally stopped at a breadshop and bought an unidentified roll (turned out to be coffee flavored… not so good), a banana, and some fruit/vegetable juice.  I wasn’t prepared to wander much further in the heat, so I headed back to my hotel to get some more work done before my meeting starts tomorrow.  I still need to figure out how I get from here to the conference site…

So, I arrived ~14 hours ago in Taipei after 18 hours of traveling. China Airlines was much nicer than I expected, with good vegetarian meals and individual movie selections in English. I stood at the baggage carousel hoping that LAX actually managed to get my luggage onto the China Airlines plane during my 2 hour layover… no luck. Once again, I was sitting at a counter with a very nice, though not very fluent English-speaking, baggage clerk. We filled out the paperwork and I headed to my hotel empty handed. China Airlines has a nice online tracking feature for lost luggage, and I was very excited this morning when the website said that they had found my bag. I’m not sure how they got it here so fast but it was just delivered to my room… yeah for clean clothes and a full set of toiletries! I spent all morning working in my hotel room because I don’t really want to go out in the 85 degree heat in the sweater I wore to fly. Now, I’m going to change and venture out into Taipei to find lunch. I’ll have to come back and work for the afternoon (proposal deadline looming) but at least I’ll have been outside.

This evening, a bridge on a major interstate just next to the University suddenly collapsed.  As far as I know, our family and friends are all safe.  Charles was actually supposed to be heading to the North suburbs for an orchestra rehearsal, probably via that route.  Thankfully, he heard about the tragedy before he reached that part of his journey and detoured.  Nobody knows the cause of the collapse and so far, the news reports that there are 6 fatalities… send your good thoughts to the Twin Cities tonight.