On Wednesday I arrived at Taoyuan International Airport at about 5:00 am. The airport was slightly confusing, especially due to the need to take a skytrain to get to the arrivals area after leaving the plane, but I got out in under an hour. It was light out by then, so I took a bus to Taipei Main Station. I thought it might be too early to check into my hostel, so I read for a bit at the station and walked around the streets south west of the station for a while. I found the hostel (the Taipei Ximen BackPackers Hostel) on foot and checked in. I looked around a little more after that, but was too tired to do much else that day.

The hostel is located in the Ximending area of the Wanhua district of southwest Taipei. Ximending is a apparently a trendy place for youth to go. It definitely becomes crowded with young people in the evenings and weekends. There are a lot of food stores around, and several film cinemas that the area is apparently known for. There are several streets that are given over to pedestrians when it gets crowded. The other parts of Wanhua I've seen are similarly dense but seemingly less trendy.

The sidewalks are very busy here, with open store fronts and small stalls. On many streets the buildings overhang the sidewalk, with a row of pillars near the street. The inner part of the sidewalk gets shaded and is mostly used for walking. The spaces between the pillars get used for scooter parking (sometimes this is in addition to a row of parked scooters on the street as well), stalls, store displays, and seating for small restaurants. Almost all of the stores have automatic metal doors which are lowered when the store is closed. Higher up, many of the buildings have metal cages for window boxes and balcony extensions.

The streets themselves are also very busy. There are a lot of scooters. Crosswalks generally have a much longer pedestrian crossing time than they do in Vancouver, at 60 to 90 seconds. However, vehicles get a correspondingly long time as well. Some intersections allow pedestrians on crosswalks in both directions at once, and in some places there are marked diagonal crosswalks that can also be used in this case.

There are also a number of bikes around. Later I saw what looked like rental bikes near Taipei 101. I was once told (when walking by the river; see below) that on weekdays there was only one bike rental location, somewhere near Taipei Main Station, so I'm not sure if the one I saw was actually usable. In any case, I would not dare ride a bike in the traffic here.

On Thursday I set out in the morning to look for the Danshui river which is the west edge of Taipei. That took longer than I expected, because the parks along the river are separated from the streets by a wall, and the entrances are not all very visible. However, I eventually found a way in, and walked along the river for a while. There are fairly extensive parks for some distance along the river, which seem to be there at least partly for birds. For most of the distance the trails closest to the river are between a marshy strip by the water and a grass strip inland. There is only intermittent shade, so it is quite hot. Perhaps due to this, I was about the only person on foot on the trails. However, there were a number of people on bikes. Occasionally there was more shade, and in places there were groves of trees with seating areas and playgrounds. I turned into the city again at Zhongxiao road and went to find the Youth Hub (on Zhongxiao a few blocks past Taipei Main Station) to get my travel card. After that I decided to keep exploring on foot, and continued along Zhongxiao to the Xinyi district in east Taipei. Xinyi has Taipei 101 and some of the other large modern buildings. It feels bigger and cleaner than Wanhua, but there is much less going on on the streets. The sidewalks are wider, but not used for as much. Even scooter parking seems to stay in the street here. I walked by Dr Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and Taipei 101, but other than that there isn't too much to see in the area. On the way back to the hostel I tried the MRT for the first time.

The MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) is the city rail system. It's comparable to Vancouver's Skytrain, but handles many more people, with long trains and large stations. There are several lines going in different directions. The system is quite easy to use. There are displays at stations indicating the fare to get to each other station, with the cost starting at 20 TWD and going up by distance. The ticket machines give you a token which you use to get into the track area and out again at the other end. Most of the system (that I've seen, at least) is underground, but the line that goes north over the Keelung river turns into a raised track. In the underground part the stations are usually under streets, with entrances on both sides of the street and sometimes on all four corners of an intersection. The stations are sometimes so large that going through one can feel like a journey by itself, at least without already knowing where to go. There are a few nice details, like displays at stations indicating when the next train will arrive and lights on the trains indicating which side the doors will open on next. Interestingly, the train doors stay open longer than the Vancouver Skytrain doors do. Perhaps relatedly, people getting on seem to block the doors less than they do in Vancouver (wider doors and better floor markings for lineups probably also help).

I haven't used the bus system except in special cases (see below), but it looks similarly well thought out. There are many buses of various sizes on the streets. Bus stops have route maps, and in some cases have displays indicating when buses will arrive.

On Friday and Saturday I spent most of both afternoons at the National Palace Museum. I hadn't been planning to spend so much time there, but it was very interesting. The main exhibits are primarily jade and bronze pieces up through the Han dynasty and pottery from subsequent dynasties. There was also a room of highlights including the Jadeite Cabbage with Insects and the Meat-shaped Stone, although I found these less interesting than the more historical pieces. I also visited the Chihshan Garden next to the museum. Getting to the museum involves taking the MRT to Shilin and then a bus from there. Shilin apparently has a bit night market. I looked around a little on the way home, but didn't see too much.

On Sunday I walked around on foot a little more, and then went to visit Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and the botanical gardens. Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and the plaza it is on, including the National Theatre and Concert Hall, are very large and have impressive architecture. I didn't know enough about what I was seeing at the botanical gardens to find anything too exciting, but it was a nice place to walk. A prominent feature was the large lotus pond.

On Monday I went to the mountain trails just east of the city. It probably wasn't the best day to do this because it was starting to rain and was windy (although actually it has always been windy when I have been in large open areas in Taipei), but I decided to start and see if it seemed safe. There turned out to be a number of people on the trails, so I decided it was ok to continue. The trails are largely stone steps and go up very steeply on the slopes. I found the steps took a lot of energy to go up, but they make the trails clean and well defined. Everything was very well maintained. Some of the trails had lights, and are apparently lit at night. The trails were well marked and most of the signs had English. Besides the route signage, some of the lower parts had displays on ecology and geography, and there were plaques built into the trail that seemed to be showing plants and animals. I spent the afternoon walking, and got to what I think must have been the Elephant and 9-5 peaks (this was one place where English signs were lacking). Both of these points and a number of places along the way have amazing views of the city. The highest location I reached, at what I believe was 9-5 peak, looked to be roughly at the same hight as the upper floors of Taipei 101.

There are a number of small buildings near the trails, even near the top. There were several temples and quite a few shrines. I didn't look too closely except in the couple of places where the path went right through them, but I could hear chanting from some of the temples. There were also some buildings that seemed to be for park maintenance, along with small gardens and collections of potted plants. I'm not sure what the other buildings were. It is possible that there are a few people living up there, but it may also be that these buildings are connected with either the temples or park management, or are just old and abandonded.

There were a couple of quite large (maybe palm-sized including the legs, although fairly spindly) spiders with webs in the bushes a few feet from the path. I didn't go close or try to photograph them at the time because I wasn't sure what they were, but I after a quick search later it looks like they might be called giant wood spiders, and are not dangerous. You can find existing photos from the same area. There was also what I assume was a praying mantis, what was probably a plump grey squirrel (it was moving too fast to see well), and a large snail. There were also a number of dogs along the trails, not all of which had any obvious owner. This is often the case in the city as well. However, the dogs are almost always very well behaved, and I've only had one bark at me. They are generally not large. In the city there are also a few cats in parks (the Chihshan garden and the botanical gardens; I didn't see any on the mountain, though). They look like house cats, and I assume must be living in the parks. I've only seen one cat that looked like it lived with someone.

Tuesday was relatively quiet. I stayed near the hostel in the morning and early afternoon, partly to see if I would get an email about one of the tours for the youth travel program, and also to give my feet a break. Later in the afternoon I went to see more of the Longshan Temple area and saw some of the other temples and the night markets. Longshan Temple is in Wanhua a few blocks south of Ximending. The temple has an MRT station named after it right across the street, along with a plaza and an underground mall. The area around it has many religious supply stores, lots of food including several vegetarian places near the temple, night markets on a number of streets, and several smaller temples. The rain continued intermittently, and for a few minutes on Tuesday evening it rained hard enough to be audible inside the hostel.