19 March 2014
Newer Taichung
I have found the newer part of Taichung. It is about 8km away from what is called central Taichung, soon to be renamed Taichung old city, in an area called Xitun.
It has a few department stores and cinemas, and nearby is the enormous night market which I have yet to see, hopefully its more like the Taiwan ones, on dedicated closed off streets, rather than playing chicken with buses.
On the subject of buses, I had to take one to get to Xitun, cause I didnt know where it was, and its hot here, so I decided it might be best to not walk in blind hope of finding a destination.
This proved difficult, but I now know they take Taipei metro IC cards, of which I already have one, so there wont be a repeat of this morning.
I get on the bus and try to pay cash, its not a fixed fare, you are supposed to tell the driver where you are going.....I dont know.
I tried to explain that I would happily pay the maximum fare and just get off whereever I felt like. A couple of Nannas came to my rescue, and started rattling off names of possible destinations in English. I picked the city hall. They were so happy to be of assistance. This fare cost about 20 cents...
The signs on the bus actually update based on GPS and show you in English, I followed along on my GPS and sure enough City hall is in the new part of the city.
There are footpaths. There are over and underpasses to cross the road safely, there are restaurants, lots of cafes, parks and trees, and a lot of construction.
Theres also museums, since it felt like its about 40 degrees even though its only 25, I thought I would visit one of them, for the princely sum of 30 cents.
A typical Taichung street, out the front of my hotel. The hotel breakfast was interesting, the breakfast room is like a space station, and then the meals on offer are strange even for China/Taiwan. Yes you can have toast or cereal or even scrambled eggs, but there were a whole heap of strange combinations served in those little paper cup cake things.
Combinations like salami, raisins and egg salad. Or smoked salmon, tofu and salsa. Perhaps corn, preserved sausage and mashed potato.
Nobody seemed to be eating them. I think the hotel thinks they are very cool and are trying to invent new taste sensations.
This is the walkway to the natural science museum. It has marble dinosaur inlays. There really arent many trees in Taichung! This few hundred metres of greenery is listed as a top tourist spot to experience nature in the city.
The nature being of the inlayed in concrete variety as opposed to the deer in the main streets of Nara in Japan.
This is the natural science museum. It looks crap in photos, but its enormous and very high quality.
Lots of walkways are clear glass with projections under foot that change as you step on them.
There are 5 or 6 different interlinked buildigs, each with various exhibits, many interactive.
Theres at least 30 interactive stations where you can control microscopes or cameras such as this. The microscopes were great but hard to photograph. They seem to have an electron microscope hooked up to a projector showing cells on something.
I dont know what this is. There was also a water powered clock, and a section on Oceania below everything else with no one at all bothering to go down there.
Now heres a great job! You sit in a glass cube, stuffing and posing dead animals to be put on display whilst hundreds of people look at you and take flash photography.
The dinosaur exhibit was most popular with the many school groups. Theres also dinosaurs outside in the gardens. I snuck this sneaky photo of one of the color coordinated school groups charging around at top raspberry cordial speed.
Herding them all together for a photo was an impressive demonstration of whistle blowing.
Note they all have matching water bottles, I remember at the Taipei zoo years ago they also had matching hats, backpacks, torches and their own whistles. Basically an earthquake survival kit.
They also had a confronting exhibit on death, including the executed criminals that were finely sliced into thousands of pieces. But I enjoyed this cryogenic tank, one for whole body, one for head only. Which would you choose?
Across the road is the botanic gardens. My 30 cents also gets me in here, and damn it I need to get some value for my large outlay.
This is pretty much the entire garden in this shot.
However they manage to keep their biodome thing going, unlike Adelaide whos bicentennial conservatory gift to the people is now turned off, with some of the glass removed, so that everything inside can die.
A giant dragonfly, last night it was ice cream. Australia isnt the only place that does this.
Me and everyone else wanted to go up that platform near the top, but they dont let you!
Next up is the local temple, which this morning is staging some sort of karaoke contest for elderly stroke victims. I dont know but it sounded terrible, so bad that I made a video. Weird that they would have such huge P.A. systems to broadcast their terrible unaccomponied groaning across the city.
Now here we are, crossing a road in the new part of the city. The trees are very colorful.
This is the new city hall. It is absolutely enormous, and so very Chinese. I will need to go back and do a proper exploration, as I think theres 4 sides to it and an open square in the middle.
They have wisely left room to drive tanks into the square in case of a student uprising.
Heres a few of the department stores. Unlike the rest of Asia, China (and Taiwan which is more or less China) still leaves theirs unintegrated and stand alone. Each one tries to entrap you inside so you cant easily walk underground or across outside walkways linking them.
These 3 buildings in a row all feature about 10 floors of clothing, 2 basement floors of supermarket, 2 floors of restaurants near the top, and a cinema on the top floor.
It can take you about 30 minutes to get out of them if you go up to the top, they stop you from taking the stairs and I swear the lifts only go up.
The escalators are then arranged in such a way its very easy to go up, but to go down requires you to cross from one side of the floor to the other.
This is looking back towards where I had come from. I believe this street is one of only 2 main boulevardes through Taichung, that have proper footpaths and signage and underpasses at busy intersections.
On floor 16 of Top City, and they have decided to make it mini Japan town, again. I dont want anymore Japanese food!
Instead I had steak on top of noodles with an egg and vegetables and a bonus salad. I better find some proper beef noodle soup soon!
Heres the smog laden view from the cinema lobby on the top floor of one of the inescapable department stores.