Feasting at the Table

"Feasting at the Table of Taipei", Matt Gross' excellent New York Times article lauding the variety and quality of food in Taipei, correctly identifies Taiwan as a hugely underrated travel destination.

Gross has done me the service of picking out a whole bunch of restaurants that I really must try soon. I'm already familiar with Kiki, although their fare is more Szechuan-style than Taiwanese. But decent Taiwanese food is available at every night market.

Saturday Night during Sinlaku

Typhoon Sinlaku was never all that scary here in Taipei. Here are some pictures I took on Saturday evening. I was standing in the open area across from our apartment on the 6th floor.


Despite the visible raindrops on the lens in two of the pictures, it wasn't even raining all that hard. (I took the pics during one of the lulls.)

Typhoon Sinlaku

That's Typhoon Sinlaku two days ago, when it was much further out to sea.

Now it's right off of Taiwan's northeastern coast, and is about to move directly over northern Taiwan v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. That means we're going to get torrential rain for the next 24 hours at least.

We're in southern Taipei City, and it's just before 9pm on Saturday September 13. We've been getting heavy rain all day long with a couple of lulls. We live on the top floor of a 6-story building. We've always had a problem with leaks in our kitchen; for the past few hours we've grown accustomed to having puddles on our kitchen floor. I can mop up the puddles, and I have some short-term success, but then the water inexorably spreads again. Like it's reproducing itself.

Still, as much of an inconvenience as Typhoon Sinlaku is, I imagine we're a lot better off than people in southeastern Texas right now.

The August 30 Rally

On August 30 - 100 days since Ma Ying-jeou assumed office as President of Taiwan - several thousand people, if not several hundred thousand people, rallied in downtown Taipei. The rally was organized by the DPP and other "green" political parties, and we saw many expressions of Taiwanese nationalism, support for Taiwan's bid to join the United Nations, and concern over the Taiwanese economy.



Although it wasn't an official anti-Ma protest, there were many anti-Ma signs. The general attitude of the crowd was that Ma is too close to China and has not done enough to help the Taiwanese economy.



The people at the rally were very friendly and the whole event was very peaceful.





For more pictures and commentary of the August 30 rally, there's Michael Turton's blog.

Two more bits of English: