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I have now been in Taiwan for longer than a ‘holiday’ and this means that I’ve seen some of Taipei but also that my understandings of the city and its quieter idiosyncrasies remain limited. I have, however, occupied the role of primary observer for most of the past three weeks, looking closely at all things and asking myriad questions and taking enough photos that I now regret not purchasing a camera ahead of my arrival. In any case, these three weeks of close interactions and Su’s patient explanations mean I feel a little better knowing that I’m about write a series of subjective and indelible statements onto the internet.
So, here follows two short reactions to this part of the world. They are less opinion driven than those yet to be written and should serve as a scattered introduction to my version of Taipei.
/the weather/
It rains a lot. At the time of my writing this sentence, if I type ‘weather’ into Google there is rain forecast for seven of the next seven days. At the back of our flat we have an open-walled utility room and beyond that, across an alley, there is a block of flats with balcony roofing made from tin and plastic. We have bamboo growing tall as our utility room’s ceiling and it obscures the real outside. This means the most we can do is hear the rain - and though its sound is often huge from the running & drumming of collected water, the rain itself isn’t always heavy. Just like where you live, there are many types of rain: from motes of insignificance that land directly onto your eyeball to sometimes trigger a blink, all the way to the type of rain that coats cars in a loud splashed fur.
The rain is less affecting than rain in a British winter, likely because it’s warmer here and maybe also because I am new to this city and am stimulated by enough of my environment that the rain doesn’t distress me at all*. The city’s beauty isn’t diminished by the weather; on many days the grey is modified by a filtered sun which flushes the world into a subtle orange. The roads are free from potholes and are without the rough grained texture of winter weathered roads in the UK; they are fine enough to shine, when wet, with details of cars and illuminated signs. Currently, there is no wind during rain, meaning the drops falls in predictable patterns and that if you carry an umbrella, even the heaviest of rain is cast over and around your clothes (but I guess typhoon season will be different).
Typically the temperature has fluctuated between a chill low of 15°C and a high of 22°C. I promise you that 15°C feels worse here than it does in the UK, but I’m not asking for your sympathy. This weekend, however, there was a forty-four year daytime low of 4°C and thirty-six people died from the cold. I was shivering; the flat has no heating.
*But, as I re-read this draft, the rain has been pouring non-stop for over 48h and, honestly, I am hoping it stops soon.
/the city/
Taipei feels large. It is less sprawling than London but its buildings are built tall for far from its centre and really I never went to the residential limits of London so the two cities’ distances, from one commercial district to the next, to the next, and then to home, seem comparable. Its buildings are a blend of concrete blocks and polished stone luxuries as well as many glass towers, all set next or near to older, smaller, pieces of Taipei.
The city grew in a basin, surrounded by sheer forested mountains. The entirety of this very flat area is urbanised and what was once ‘Taipei County’ is now ‘New Taipei City’ and is, interestingly(?), more populous than Taipei. The whole area seems to function united, with the metro & bus systems spanning both Taipei and New Taipei City.
Taipei is gridded. There is a set of long, mostly straight, many-laned arterial roads, some of which run the length of the city. Along them are business signs that glow with every neon, but they aren’t eternal, and come shop-close, the streets lose their rainbow periphery. Crawling in the space away from these highways are thousands of dense ‘Lanes’ which are named numerically and which are mostly without pavements, having instead painted areas marking their pedestrianised zones. The lanes are still unnavigable to me, and yet when led by either of Su’s parents, we move through them with a particular type of efficiency, pausing and dodging and weaving and waving but never turning back and never stopping to look at a screen for reassurance.
Here’s a fact: Su says Taipei is known as ‘Alleys Culture’ in China.
Right now, the lanes are my favourite thing about Taipei. They are less gleaming and dazzling than the mall-after-mall mega of the Xinyi shopping district, but they vary with a different type of conglomeration. They are unpredictable, loud and then sometimes suddenly quiet; they can be beautiful, often lined with overhanging trees with intricate exposed roots; and the food there is … well, I’ll get to that.
Taipei’s transportation infrastructure is efficient and cheap and mostly brilliant, but I’ll probably spend the next post writing about the MRT and the buses and taxis and YouBikes and so won’t say much about it here, but I will say that I get full phone signal when traveling underground.
And that’s enough for now.
