Juming Museum, Taiwan

The Juming Museum is an enormous outdoor garden, filled with sculpture. There are dozens of monumental bronze statues of tai chi practicioners, soldiers and people in flight.

Apparently.

Village Of The Cats

After eight blissful hours of sleep, we arose this morning and took a train from Taipei Central out to Pingxi. Or Pingsi. There is some ambiguity here, partly because of the difficulty of transcribing Chinese in a Latin script, and partly because somebody has been round the town applying little 'S' stickers over the X in Pingxi. Or little 'X' stickers over the S in Pingsi.

Sleep deprivation, Taiwan style

It probably wasn't such a good idea to go to the cinema at 11:30 last night, but these late-night film trips seem to be a staple of our visits to Taipei, and since Taiwan is good enough to screen movies really, really late (audiences were still coming in as we left at 1:30) it seems rude not to.

Taroko Gorge

Today we took a trip to Taroko Gorge; I've visited Taiwan seven times in the past two-and-a-half years, and people have always banged on about the need to visit Taroko Gorge, so finally we booked a tour through Golden Foundation Travel. (You can use Expedia to book with them online - 200 USD at the time of writing - if you don't like faxing credit card details around.)

Running in Taipei

I was at a loose end when I got to Taipei, so after getting in a strange man's car and being charged about 500 NTD over the odds to be driven from the airport to my hotel, I spent the afternoon not sure what to do, and conscious that I had the ActionAsia race the next day and didn't want to wear myself out running to and from between different tourist attractions.

China Airlines: What have I done to deserve this?

Travelling with China Airlines from Hong Kong is pleasantly surprising. I booked a cheap 2-day package in Taipei, for a running race tomorrow morning, and when I get to the check-in desk without even asking I'm given access to the lounge, and a seat right up by the front of the plane. This was even before I'd passed them my frequent flyer card; I'm now wondering if China Airlines have decided on a policy of random acts of kindness to passengers.

Chang Tsai, Fine Art Museum of Taiwan

We started the day with a visit to Taipei's Museum of Fine Art. Unlike when we visited at Christmas, Cai Guo and his exploding car extravaganza was not in situ; not was the hot tub full of strangers. Given the weather was chilly and damp, perhaps the second absence was a good thing.

Clash of the Titans

In Taipei for the weekend, what better way to sample the local culture than to spend half an hour playing geriatric arcade games, then watching Sam Worthington in Clash of the Titans, in 3D?

At the risk of repeating myself

I read back through the last few entries. I hadn't realised how much I'd gone on about the smell of eggs in the Big Eye Tuna. Ah well, repetition is the soul of wit, after all.

Fish

The hotel that we're staying in has an unusual design feature; the toilet is enclosed in a glass cubicle, next to the glass shower cubicle, which is next to the bath, which is next to a large window to the bedroom. This means that your significant other can have a clear and unobstructed view of you on the toilet, whether she likes it or not.

Hotel after hotel...

I'm now down near the southernmost tip of Taiwan, in Kenting. The last two nights we stayed in the Big Eye Tuna hotel in Kaohsiung. This was a slightly strange hotel, as the facade of the building was made from foot-wide plastic scales, as if to confuse you into thinking it really was a tuna made flesh. Well, a mythical tuna-hotel made flesh. If the Taiwanese have myths about fish performing valuable infrastructural roles in the hospitality industry, that might well be the case.

Boxing Day surprises

People keep telling us things, and then they start happening to us. Last night we met an acquaintance from Hong Kong who lives in Taipei, who warned us about the mad people who hang out at the main station and talk to people, and now every time we go near the station somebody will come up and try to make conversation with me. They don't seem properly mad, in terms of the government-is-reading-our-minds-and-we-must-all-wear-tinfoil-hats; since the extent of their conversation is to ask me how long I'm in Taipei for and where I'm from, they're essentially harmless, but it's odd that they never approached me before. Or perhaps I'm just hanging around in the railway station more frequently.

Christmas Day in the Republic of China

To date, our journey around Taiwan seems to involve confounding our expectations: we keep setting off towards some destination, only to be waylaid by another attraction or just by walking in the wrong direction for an hour.