Category Odd places
I’ve been living in Taiwan for more than ten years now but funnily enough it’s only recently that I’ve started to discover just how many odd places there are in this country. If you check the Taiwanese map for landmarks and tourist spots you’re not likely to find them, which is part of the reason it took me so long. However, if you take the time to explore the back streets, country roads and other less touristic parts of the country, and you pay a little bit of extra attention to your surroundings, you might stumble on some such place … Read the rest
The thing about Taiwan’s countryside is, like Forrest Gump said, like a box of chocolate, you never know what you’re gonna get. Last weekend we went up in the mountains outside Hsinchu without any real plan. As we were driving along a small, rather remote road we rounded a corner and came upon a bunch of large, colorful paintings on the concrete wall next to the road. This was utterly unexpected. This was deep enough into the mountains that you’d expect to see little more than vegetation and waterfalls, yet here was some extremely colorful art. This of course fit … Read the rest
Not too long ago I was running some errands and on the way home I took a bit of a detour along some smaller side streets. While I was riding along I happened on a small park by the river and stopped to look around. It seemed to be little more than a path next to the shallow, partially overgrown river. I strolled along it for a few hundred meters until it ended then turned around to see where it led to in the other direction.
A couple of months ago I wrote about something I call neglected spaces. This weekend we found a place that isn’t actually neglected but has a lot of the same vibes. It’s a place called 大里溪橋下小人國 which roughly translates to Little People Country Under Dali Creek Bridge. It’s hidden away underneath country route 63, just at the end of the Dali river bridge. Most people will never even know it’s there, passing over it on their way somewhere else, and if they pass by on one of the small roads on the side of the bridge, it’s still unlikely they … Read the rest