Taiwan: Day 1

Rather than try to summarize our nearly two and a half weeks in Taiwan in a single post I've decided to share a post a day.  That way I can include more pictures and not feel too overwhelmed trying to include everything.  We left for Taiwan on May 12th and arrived late on May 13th (darn dateline stole a day from us!).  I don't actually have any pictures from our first evening spent walking around the city of Beitou (pronounced like the beginning of Beethoven) where we were staying with Shannon (my sister-in-law) and Mike (her husband).  If I'd been on the ball I probably could have taken some pretty neat night shots, but as it was, I didn't take my camera with us on our walk.  

The next day (our first full day in Taiwan) started off really lousy as my body didn't like the shock of the 12 hour time change and the greasiness of breakfast was not sitting well.  By about 11:00 I'd recovered enough to join Shannon and Josh on a subway trip to Tamsui.  According to Wikitravel, "Tamsui is located near the outlet of the Tamsui (Danshui) River into the Taiwan Strait.  Originally home to Formosan indigenous peoples, Tamsui was next settled by the Spanish in 1629 as the town and mission of San Domingo.  The Spanish were expelled by the Dutch in 1641, who build Fort Anthonio, forming what is known today as Hongmao Castle.  Following the departure of the Dutch in 1661, Tamsui continued to grow, becoming the largest port in Taiwan by the 19th century.  by the 20th century, accumulation of silt in the river forced most port operations to move further north to Keelung.  Due to its close proximity to Taipei City, Tamsui has become a favorite destination for city dwellers to take a stroll and enjoy a coffee along the riverside."  During  our tour through Hongmao Castle we learned all about this cities history, and I took lots of pictures and tried out my polarized filter on my camera for the first time.  As an aside, one of my goals for this trip was to try to shoot in manual, rather than in auto or 'P' so what you see is frequently my playing with all sorts of settings on my camera.  It was a good learning opportunity, and I recommend anyone with a dSLR take the plunge, learning to play with shooting in manual!!

 The stairs on the way up to Hongmao Castle.

 Apparently you find wooden shoes where ever there is Dutch history

 This is the castle.... although I believe it spent the longest part of it's history as a British consulate.

So to summarize, this site belonged to the Formosan's, the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, and was controlled by the Japanese during most of the war years, and I think the Chinese for a period too.

 A typical street lined with shops and scooters.  As I understand it, all residential property must have a business on it's main level, and as such there were hundreds of little tiny stores that specialized in all sorts of things from food, to coffee, to car-washes, to scooter repair, to shrines, to pretty well anything you could imagine.  

 A market street (notice the car driving among all the people... no matter where you walked, you were always at risk for being driven over by cars, vans, trucks, or scooters).

 This chicken is "famous" -- rather than being "popular," things or places are "famous" which literally translates to mean "has a name."  They also say weird things like "paper, scissors, stone" instead of "rock, paper, scissors."

This man has a fancy windshield and windshield wiper on his scooter. 

I love the juxtaposition of the sacred and the secular.  That's just how life is.