Sunday, July 31, 2005

What did you do yesterday?

Something I ask my students all the time. Yesterday, I went to Taibei again. I feel like maybe I should be more adventurous and try going somewhere else, but there's an awful lot to see and do in Taibei so I'm pretty content with it for the time being. Anyway, as there was no typhoon or anything like that my fourth visit to Taibei was pretty enjoyable. I'm getting a lot of use out of my Youyouka, which is an electronic card that you can put money on and then use on the Taibei buses or MRT. I went back to Ximending and walked around. I'm not entirely sure what the big deal is about this place, but it could be that I'm just missing something. Anyway, they had these really elaborate sets advertising The Brothers Grimm. I walked around a good bit, got myself lost, found myself (at least geographically, the other part I'm still working on). I hopped back on the MRT and went off to Taibei 101, there's apparently a free shuttle bus, but honestly when where you want to end up is the tallest building in the world it's really not that hard to figure out how to get there. I mainly went there for the bookstore, the mall is large and shiny, and if you're into that thing I'm sure it's pretty cool. Otherwise, it's sort of like being back in America.

Incidentally for those of you Chinese studies people who are reading this, I ran into Zhou laoshi's book while in the bookstore. So perhaps he'll get a better job now and leave. It's called The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry or something like that.

An area I'd like to check out more next time is the area around the Taibei Train Station, I think next time I'll walk to the peace park and check it out.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

isnt it hot?
-Michelle

lovelesscynic said...

yes, and I've also discovered that walking around between a very hot outdoors and very cool MRT and various stores for a couple hours drains me of all energy and gives me the mother of all headaches.

Alia said...

Oh man, I think I would drop to the ground screaming if I saw Zhou Ping's book out in the real world, but especially overseas. Oh, the inescapability of it all! Aww...poor Zhou. He's very talented, just not much of a teacher.