The Other China – Taiwan Report – Part 3

On my third (and last) day in Taiwan, I met up with a Taiwanese colleague of mine from the Taiwan branch of the company I work for. She took me to a posh cafe in a new shopping mall for breakfast and then sent me off to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen memorial, who was the founding father of Taiwan before Chiang Kai-Shek. From his memorial hall you have an excellent view of Taipei 101

I then ventured to the Taipei zoo station with the intention to ride a gondola up a mountain to get a view of the city from above including the 101, but alas… The gondola is closed every Monday. Sniff. Since I was at the zoo anyway, I decided to go see it for a bit, since it promised giant pandas. And they don’t just have pandas, they have a baby panda super star! She is now ten months old and what a sweetheart. On weekends and holidays they must have mile long queues for the great panda house, but at least one advantage of it being Monday was that you were let into the building without queuing in your allotted time slot (you get an extra ticket at the entrance which allows you to enter, in my case, the panda house between 13:50 and 13:59, whew).

The bears were having bamboo time when I was there and I got excellent pics of mom and dad, but baby panda showed us only her back

I rode back to my hotel and unloaded luggage (the crocodile stuffed animal I had bought at the zoo) then headed on to another two temples, the Baoan temple and the Confucius temple not too far of my final target, the Shilin night market.

I was again a bit disappointed, since also the Confucius temple was closed on Mondays. The Baoan temple was open though and of the same style as the Longshan temple, if not that old, however it sported another attraction. Puppet theater was going on. Not that I would have understood anything.

Then off to the Shilin night market which is a general market = clothes, junk and food, short: everything. I wandered through the many side streets and made another temple discovery, the loudest and most neon style of them all with shiny light bulb dragons… Awesome.



I sneaked into the back of that temple and found this wall sculpture made of lava it seemed that even had a church model inside it and a very sneaky picture of the shrine next to the refrigerator and the portable shrine in the crappy backyard.







To me moments like that are better than all the food specialties I could ever find on this market.

This temple belongs to the night market, or maybe the night market belongs to the temple. They are parts of a bigger whole, which is the life of the people around it and I am glad to have been able to take a look.

The rest of the pics are on flickr.

If you come to Asia, don’t forget Taiwan, it’s worth the trip and I’m glad I finally made it to go there. The trip was short but intense and I loved it.