Taipei 101

The tallest building in Taiwan is "Taipei 101", with 101 stories it sometimes reaches into the clouds.

It was the tallest building in the world from 2004 to 2010. On a clear day I can see it from the apartment, and it is lit up at night with special messages on days like Lantern Festival, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.

Where ever we live there are tourist places we have never gone to. We are always saving those places for when visitors come, so I was happy when my sister, Mary, and her daughter, Carrie, came to visit.

 I had never take the elevator to the observation deck, but this is why having visitors is such a good idea. From way up there you get a different view of the city.

That Taipei is in a basin with mountains surrounding it, becomes much clearer.

And if you forget your camera, they take the professional picture which you can buy(or you can take a picture of that picture when they show it on the monitor.)

GuangHua

Taipei is a city of 2.7 million people, anything you what to find you can find in Taipei. Taipei has a big electronics district, most of it is directed to selling consumer electronics.

This building has 3 floors of shops, Acer, Asus, Lenovo, HP, ... they are all there. But for me the more exciting part is the DIY(Do It Yourself) shops. These are hobby electronic shops. In the Seattle area there is one such shop, the prices are double the web price and they don't carry every thing. In the GuangHua district there are 5 shops, they sell at the web price without the hassle and delay of ordering on line. There is one shop at ground level in the GuangHua district.

The other shops are in the 2 underground floors, if you couldn't read Chinese you might miss them.

While in Taiwan, I finished an electronics project because I could just walk down to the shop and buy what I needed. If it was all through the web it wouldn't happen.

Given the LED craziness in Taiwan, you could expect GuangHua to do a good job.

Even GuangHua has some art made from discarded motherboards.

Fossil Teapot

Fossils have always been hard to explain, animal and plant parts encased in rock. How did they get there? Not much progress was made until the geologist just before Darwin speculated the the world wasn't just thousands of years old, but millions and maybe billions of years old. This concept of "deep time" provided the time for a very slow process to produce fossils. No culture got it right until the early 1800s.

So for many cultures they just put together stories that didn't conflict with their own creation myths. Using fossils as a decorative rock would seem to have a contemplative effect. How did they get there? No answers were correct until the concept of "deep time".


These are pictures of a teapot I bought in Taiwan 20 years ago.

And here is a snuff bottle Florence saw last year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I believe they are all made from the rock similar to what we saw at the JianSan

Fossil museum.

http://mikeintaipei.blogspot.com/2012/03/jiasian-fossil-museum.html

Bars

The neighborhood to the south of our apartment is one of the oldest parts of Taipei. It has narrow roads with lots of small bars and small hotels. It is a very popular place for Japanese(men) tourists. From what I've seen of Japan, it is a very clean, orderly place and so the chaos of Taiwan is attractive to them. We all travel to see something different, otherwise what's the point of travelling?

Here are some of the bar signs from that neighborhood. This is typical venue.

Somehow "piano bar" has some significance but I don't know what it means.

Similarly I don't think, Jazz is exactly the music played.

But some of them use English for the come on.

Each bar tries to attract a specific clientele,

Golf is expensive so they would be a good clientele,

Golf Bar here.

(I saw a bar which was a "Golf Bar", but I can't find it now.)

Even the gay bar is represented.

Sangaku

In a previous post, I talked about the Sangaku of Japan.

http://mikeintaipei.blogspot.com/2011/12/sanguke-in-kyoto.html

These were the geometric problems worked on my Japanese mathematician during the Tokugawa isolationist period. Many of their problems had to do with the area of different configurations of squares, triangles, circles, ... I think that fascination with geometric designs is still with us. Especially in Taiwan, because tiles are so often used. Here are some that caught my eye.

This old advertisement for Nikon cameras uses the design from a sangaku problem.

There is a popular proof of the Pythagorean Theorem based on the inner two squares and triangles of this diagram.

But the problems can have more and more components making the problem more and more complicated.

And this is the floor of the Taipei Train Station.

Suzuki 50

On the way back from my Sunday Chinese class at WenHua University, I came across this motorcycle.

It is exactly the motorcycle that I owned 45 years ago(not many things made 45 years ago are still running).

It was parked in front of a Japanese restaurant, the owner didn't let it get far from his sight. I wrote about this motorcycle in a blog just this year.

http://mikeintaipei.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-old-suzuki.html

This motorcycle is in better shape that the 2 or 3 year old one I had 45 years ago, only the seat and the color are different.

When I was in high school I spent a lot time taking apart this engine.

RR

For a long time, starting during the Japanese time, the trains we the major form of transportation. Families didn't own cars and there wasn't much of a highway system. That has changed, now highways crisscross Taiwan, even East to West using tunnels through the mountains. With the highways, buses became an alternate form. And as Taiwan grew more prosperous, more and more people own their own car.

But the trains still are a major part of transportation. The early trains from the Japanese time are all museum pieces now.

And the early RR stations are reminders of more ornate architecture.

But taking the train is still exciting.