Schedium

A few weeks ago on a Saturday I decided to go to Taipei Botanical Garden  to take a walk and escape the hustle and bustle of the city. Established during Japanese rule in 1921, the botanical garden is in itself a tourist attraction worth visiting. Located  just a few minutes walk from Xiaonanmen MRT Station , the park has about 1,500 species of plants, and there are also animals such as frogs and squirrels. However, I didn't go there to enjoy the nature, but to see a building that I'd been wanting to visit for a long time. It is a small, Chinese-style building, with a traditional curved tiled roof, white walls, and full of Chinese-style decorations. It is hard to believe that only a century ago, this structure stood in the middle of present-day downtown Taipei, on the location of today's Zhongshan Hall . 

On one of Taipei's hot and sunny day there's nothing better than finding a shadowy place to take a rest and eating a delicious ice cream. If you're looking for a such a place you may consider visiting the campus of National Taiwan University (NTU). About one and a half years ago a Taiwanese friend of mine showed me for the first time the campus. She took me to a small shop - a nice one-storey building with a few tables outside and protected from the sun by trees. She explained that all the products sold in that store are made through crops grown on NTU farmland. I bought an ice cream in that shop, and it was one of the best I've ever eaten (not surprisingly, on weekends, when many families go to the campus to walk and relax, this ice cream is often sold out). The Affiliated Experimental Farm to the College of Bio-Resources and Agriculture of National Taiwan University , as it is officially called, is a place of teaching, research and practice for students of th

On June 14 LUXY, a popular nightclub located in Taipei's Da'an District, as well as two pubs located in Zhongshan District, were the target of a massive police raid directed against drug-trafficking .  Taipei District Prosecutor's Office, Taipei Police Department, units of the Criminal Police and the Police Bureaus of Zhongshan , Da'an and Wanhua districts organised the operation jointly. Furthermore, Taiwan's Customs Office lent the police 16 detection dogs.  At midnight the police staged a fake inspection at LUXY. At 3 am three public buses stopped at Zhongxiao East Road, where the nightclub is located. But instead of normal passengers, 300 hundred policemen came out of the vehicles and raided the club, taking off guard the drug dealers and their clients. Other 380 policemen were deployed in Zhongshan District.  A total of 90 people were detained, 4 of whom were wanted criminals. 5 people were arrested on charges of drug possession, as they carried with t

When I first came to Taipei I didn't know much about its history. One thing I did know, though: Taiwan had been under Japanese rule for half a century and Taipei had been the capital of the colony. But when I walked around, I wondered why there were barely any Japanese buildings. If you go to Macau , for instance, you find thousands of houses from the Portuguese colonial era. But in Taipei, all the streets seemed not to be older than 60 or 70 years. I just came to the conclusion that Taipei must have been a colonial backwater, a small village, and that present-day Taipei had been entirely constructed after 1945. It was only after reading some books and seeing old pictures that I realised the Japanese had built a lot, and that indeed many of today's roads and thoroughfares had been created during the colonial era . It's just that after 1945 most of these buildings were torn down, with the exception of  the most representative ones.  Something similar can be seen in

It's hard to write a blog post the day after the Taipei Metro knife attack. So I decided to just upload a few pictures I took one or two days before I left Taiwan in February.  These are the pictures of a building I've always been curious about. It has an old-style tile rooftop and it looks quite old. Since it's located inside a courtyard separated from the street by a wall I couldn't see much except for the roof.  The house is in Roosevelt Road in Taipei, and I've always wondered if it's really an old one or not. My dream is that it's a Japanese or Qing-dynasty house, and that we can save it from its decay. But I'm pretty sure it's just a dream, because the whole area is modern, with nearly no exception (but there are a few, which I hope to show in the future).  I would like to meet some local Taiwanese who know something about this building. But so far, that, too, has been a dream.

In my post about my first impressions after coming back to Taipei from Hong Kong, I mentioned that sometimes Taiwanese high school students interview "foreigners" (meaning, I guess, Westerners) on the street. This is a kind of school assignment in Taiwan which is apparently very popular. Well, today it happened to me again. I was sitting at Yamazaki, on the campus of National Taiwan University. I was studying Chinese; two days ago I bought a silly book at 7-11, called "這次是我愛上妳" (This time it's me who's fallen in love with you). I chose it because the books from regular bookstores are too difficult to read, and the other books from 7-11 are manga or horror books, which I don't like. So I simply picked this one.  As a man, I feel pretty ashamed to read this sort of stuff which is obviously made for a female audience; but anyway, back to the topic. I was studying Chinese, when suddenly I saw three people, a guy and two girls, coming towards me with

Taipei street scene 1) People Wearing Surgical Masks If you go out wearing a surgical mask in Europe you'll probably see people staring at you in panic, wondering whether you want to spread a mortal disease by mingling with healthy people instead of putting yourself into quarantine.  Don't worry, it's not that in Taiwan millions of people have serious diseases. It's just a habit to wear surgical masks, and no one will think you're weird and no one will look at you if you wear one. I don't know if the habit of wearing masks comes from Japan, or if it is a consequence of the SARS panic from a few years ago, which led East Asian countries to care more about public health in their overcrowded cities. Actually, wearing masks is not a recent phenomenon; I remember reading a book written in the 1930s about Japan, in which the author described a group of Japanese soldiers' wives in occupied Manchuria wearing surgical masks. Definitely, East As

Xiahai Chenghuang Temple (by Solomon203 via Wikimedia Commons ) In February of 2012 a friend of mine took me to a famous Daoist temple in Taipei, Xiahai Chenghuang Temple (霞海城隍廟). I had asked her to show it to me because I wanted to pray to the Chinese God of Love, Yuelao. I am not a spiritual person, but I thought it would be interesting to have a first-hand experience of local religious beliefs.  Though I am not a Christian I was raised in a Christian (Catholic) society, and I have been influenced by it, no matter whether I rationally believe in that religion or not. From the point of view of Christendom, a Chinese temple may remind of an ancient Roman or Greek temple. It is a colourful building with symbols and statues. The sort of images Christians used to reject as "eidola", i.e. depictions of demons made by humans. The Christian God has nothing human. He has no shape and is beyond human rational understanding. He therefore cannot be depicted in sacre