Taipei I

I got back from Taipei on Sunday, but between teaching and writing TOEIC questions and Korean class I've been too busy this week to upload many pictures. Now it's Saturday afternoon and I'm free.

My initial impressions of Taipei - and these are mostly comparisons to Seoul:

- Taipei has a lot of motorbikes. Huge plagues of motorbikes. I used to think Seoul had plenty of motorbikes but... nope.

- Maybe it's just the week I went down, but Taipei's got some serious air pollution problems. Worse than Seoul, which is several times larger and which seldom wins accolades for the quality of its air. Maybe the motorbikes are the cause?

- The Taiwanese love dogs - of all shapes and sizes. As pets, not food. Living in Seoul, I'd gotten used to the fluffy little dogs that Koreans generally prefer as pets. But in Taiwan you regularly see all sizes of dogs out on walks (or walking around freely in small towns).

But I don't really have any impressions of the Taiwanese people. I talked to a very few of them, but I was only here from Wednesday to Sunday so I don't want to overgeneralize.

(By the way, in some of these pictures I accidentally had my camera on "manual focus" - if some of them look slightly blurry, that's why. Heck, maybe it improved them.)

I liked Taipei. I liked the food, I liked the crowds, and I liked the markets. I was able to overlook the air pollution. Of course, maybe this is partly due to the fact that I didn't have to work - and the weather was absolutely beautiful while I was there.