Monthly Archive for September, 2007

Meow

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Streets of Taipei

I’m not really one for heavy - heavy Photoshopping, normally you really want to maintain the colours and the ‘reality’ of an image. However, the one below really just works for me. It almost looks like something out of a Manga graphic novel, all the insane colours and heavy contrasting; it brings out the busy-ness of the whole scene, much more so than the above.

Anyway, in case you didn’t realise, yes, I went to Taipei, for a wedding, no less. I must say, Taipei did disappoint somewhat. I expected it to be much more ‘developed’ and when I touched down at the airport, I was rather surprised by the conditions. That’s not to say that it isn’t a great city, it definitely has a lot of character, but you can tell it has that ‘KL syndrome’, i.e. it built the tallest building in the world only to get on the map, and not really because it needs to have such a huge ass freaking tall building with money that could have been spent on more useful things, like developing infrastructure and generally the quality of life in much of the city. Or maybe teaching some people how to speak English.

But I suppose that’s the charm of the place. Old buildings, illegal marketplaces in rundown alleyways. Nightmarkets and oodles of food that would really have been loved by anyone who could speak at least one more sentence in Mandarin than I could…

Needless to say, I did enjoy the place, but I’ll save the critique for another day. Tired, with about a thousand photos to edit.

Sunset in Taipei

Of all days to trudge up YaoMingShan park it had to be extremely hazy. You can just barely make out the city in the bottom right of the photo. Nevertheless, it was rather nice. Getting lost in an entirely Mandarin speaking city just rings of ‘it’s-time-t0-learn-Mandarin-now’.