Chaing Kai Shek Memorial Hall

This is Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei. It was constructed after the death of Taiwan's president, Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, in his honor. The building is enormous. It is surrounded by a park on one side, and the National Concert Hall and the National Theater on another side. Inside the hall there is an imense statue of Chiang Kai-shek, but downstairs there is a museum with several exhibit halls including a temporary exhibit hall which was showing a mammoth exhibit while I was there. Admission to most of the halls is free.

A view of the gate at the far end of the park

Chaing Kai-shek in all his glory

Chaing Kai-shek Memorial Hall Station on the MRT is on the red line, one stop from Taipei Main Station.

To the top of the tallest building in the world: Taipei 101

What's a trip to Taipei without seeing the world's tallest building (for the moment). I suppose it's a good thing I went to Taipei when I did... in another year it will not be able to hold the title of the worlds tallest building. The Burj Dubai, in Dubai, has already reached 160 floors, but it is still not completed, so it has not yet been declared the world's largest building. If you want to read a crazy article, check out the Wikipedia article for the Burj Dubai. But... I digress.

Taipei 101 is located in the Taipei's new financial district. You can reach it from about a 10 minute walk from City Hall Station or Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall Station.



The architects tried, pretty effectivly, I think, to combine traditional chinese archetecture with a modern design. This photo explains how the building was modeled after bamboo. You can kind of see that, can't you?


This is a damper ball. I'm no physicist, but it basically keeps the building from moving too much in the wind or in the event of an earthquake. This is the biggest damper ball on public display, although most tall buildings have damper balls, though not quite this big.


Well, I am in Asia. Everything has to be cute. So, I guess in order to hype up the damper ball, they created damper babies! This is me with a damper baby. (When I first read it, I though it said diaper baby... its not a diaper baby, its a damper baby. Completely different). They are kind of cute though, huh?


Here is the entrance down at the first floor. The first 5 floors or so is a large shopping area.


Yes, that's Prada and Dior. No I did not do any shopping in this mall. This was just the tip of the iceberg... there was Armani, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana... etc etc etc... for five floors. Why bother even looking? You know the cheapest thing is going to be $500.


Here is a nice aireal view of the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall. You kind of feel like you're in an airplane... everything starts to take on that toy-like quality when you're up so high.

A view of Taipei and the mountains in the distance. The two white bridges in the photo are McArthrur 1 and McArthur 2. Yup, really.

Longshan Temple, Taipei City, Taiwan

Longshan Temple is the oldest temple in Taipei. It was constructed in 1738 by settlers from Fujian, China. The temple is an excelent example of traditionl Chinese archetecture, although it has been rebuilt many times over the past three centuries due to earthquakes, fires and bombings. It's surprising how little information I could find out about this temple on the web. Everyone and their brother has posted pictures from their visit, like I have here, but the only other information I was able to find about the temple was that it worships a mixture of Buddhist, Taoist and folk deities. If anyone has more information about this temple, I'd love to know more. The temple has a website, but it's all in Chinese, so I can't read it.

I love all the dragons on the roofs here....

Quick stop by Taipei, Taiwan for the long weekend...

This past weekend was a holiday weekend in Korea. This holiday is Chuseok, basically the Korean thanksgiving. The most important part of the holiday, it seems, is the tradition of bowing to your ancestors. Then of course they is partying and eating and all the rest.

Since I am not Korean, and have no family, I saw no reason not to take the four-day weekend to get out of the country and do some traveling... Me and two friends hopped over to Taipei for the weekend. I'll have to admit, Taiwan was never on my life's must-see list, but it was perfect for a long weekend.

... Or at least would have been... had mother nature not had her say in the matter...

I had jokingly suggested that we might arrive just in time for a nice typhoon, when we booked our tickets right during typhoon season. (Remember... a typhoon is the same as a hurricane, just in the Pacific ocean, instead of the Atlantic). But... I didn't really think it would happen. I figured that if there were a typhoon, all flights would be canceled... but... well... airplanes are surprisingly tough...

Taipei welcomed us with the driving winds and torrential rains of typhoon Sinlaku. It was pretty intimidating, but we did manage to venture out for a little while our first day there. We found the best dumpling place in the city (in my humble opinion) and wondered over to a night market, though not much was open because of the typhoon.

We stayed at the Eight Elephant's Hostel, near Guting Station. This hostel was easily one of the best I've ever stayed in. It was extremely clean, had three individual showers, and two individual bathrooms, and the sinks were outside all the bathrooms (so there's no one waiting in line to use the bathroom while someone is in the shower... if you've ever done hostaling... you know how that works..). The hostel was in a great area, it was a very quiet neighborhood, but we were able to get anywhere on the metro (MRT) in less than half an hour. The only problem was finding the hostal. It's very non-descript, and the only sign someone who wrote the name of the hostal in small letters with a sharpie on the front door. Not really what you keep your eyes out looking for. Especially when you're in torrential rains trying to find your hostel as quickly as possible.

Taipei's metro, which is called the MRT, is quick, efficient, easy to use, and cheap. While they base the fares on distance (like Seoul), it's easy to purchace individual tokens that have the correctt fare programed into them (they are small plastic tokens that must have a computer chip inside). Each token machine has a map of the subway with the price to get to each station from the station you are in. Just throw in your money, it will spit out a token, and you're good to go.

The money was a little difficult to use at first, because it's not easy to caculate the value in USD, which is how I'm used to thinking of prices, of course. $1.00 USD= 32 TWD. So we figured that $100 TWD was about $3 USD. What a headache. But you get used to it fast enough.

Taiwan was very affordable. We ate out three meals a day, bought a few souvenirs, and paid for our entire hostal stay (three nights), for under $200 USD. Our hostal was about $16.00 USD a night (well worth it), and I don't think we ever paid more than $4 USD per person/ per meal. A plate of fried rice was about 90-100 TWD, a plate of 10 pot stickers was about 30 TWD, beef soup was about 120 TWD. Not bad at all.

Anyway, Soon I'll be posting pictures and information about some of the things I did while in Taipei! See you soon!