Lots more to say about Taipei, though. On Monday I moved from the little boutique hotel to Academia Sinica, the big government-funded research institute where my linguistics conference was going to be held. I had a few free days because the conference wasn't to begin until Thursday.
When I arrived, I couldn't check into my room in the Activities Center right away, so I hung out for a bit in the lobby. There was a lot of noise coming from the auditorium. I peeked in, and was greeted by this extremely cute and entertaining sight:
On Monday afternoon I went with my good friend Weera to look at my old neighborhood around National Taiwan University campus (公館 Gōngguǎn). In 1994, when I was studying there, I went out to Academia Sinica once. As I recall, it took forever to get there by bus -- at least an hour -- and around the research center was mostly farmland, only a handful of small restaurants on the one little street outside the gates. But now the area around Academia Sinica is all built up, and the new subway system has a stop only a mile or so away. So now traveling between the two locations is a breeze.
The subway system is great. Like all major transit systems around the world these days -- including even Seattle! -- Taipei has an RFID-chip travel card that you can load with money and use on a variety of forms of public transportation. But since there is a minimum 500 NTD to start a card, I just bought individual subway tickets. Or tokens, I should say. The system is really innovative. Instead of giving you a little paper card with a magnetic strip -- which is subject to getting mangled in your pocket, or to fluttering away on a breeze, and anyway ends up in landfill -- the ticket machine spits out a hard little plastic coin, like this:
But it's not what it appears. Inside is a little RFID chip which knows how much money you've paid. You wave it over the sensor as you go through the turnstile, and it records the stop you are entering. When you exit, you drop it into a coin slot. The fare is checked against the distance you've traveled, and the coin is ready to be reused.
When we got to our destination the rain was coming down torrentially. In Seattle we rarely have thunderstorms, and never have rain that crashes this heavily and unrelentingly. The intensity of these afternoon storms in Taipei is rather unsettling. Fortunately, many of the sidewalks are covered. (Commercial buildings in Taipei generally have a set-back first story, essentially creating a double sidewalk. The outer sidewalk, the real sidewalk, is where all the motorbikes are parked. Sometimes there is also some room to walk. The inner sidewalk is covered by the floor of the story above, providing shade in summer and protection from precipitation. When it's really hot it's nice to walk along the inner sidewalk and get blasted by arctic air-conditioning as you trigger the automatic sliding doors of the shops and restaurants that you walk past.)
This is what a Taipei thunderstorm looks and sounds like:
We couldn't make it from the subway stop all the way to NTU campus staying covered, and even with umbrellas, there was no way we could be out in the rain for long without getting completely soaked. So we made our way gingerly to a cafe. Taipei is now full of fancy coffee shops, many with European names, something unheard of when I was living there in the early 1990s. Weera and I made our way to a Tiramisu (提拉米蘇) Cafe, and sat for hours over mochas, chatting.
That snack is surprisingly good. Cheesecake outside, blueberry inside, cookie on the bottom. We got a little pack of five of them.
Eventually the rain subsided, and we made our way over to the Gongguan neighborhood and campus. It was already dark. I originally wanted to go see the dorm I had stayed in (and that at least one reader of this blog also stayed in), but due to the lateness of the hour we canceled that plan. Campus was little changed -- I recognized some of the buildings and the main roadways. It would have been easier in the daytime. The area around campus was completely transformed, however. Only the church and the McDonald's were recognizable. It was so hard to get coffee in the 1990s -- there was one little shop one of my exchange student classmates discovered, it was incredibly expensive, but some of us liked to sit there nursing a $6 cup of hot chocolate and do our homework in air-conditioned comfort. Now there are so many cafés you can't help tripping over them as you walk around.
We had a late dinner of dumplings and zhajiangmian, and then headed back home.
To be continued in next post ...
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