Walking away from buying a new lens, I was amused by this underpass and the faces that jumped up at me as I walked up and down the steps.
Category: Made in Taiwan
Thoughts from an Industrial Designer living in Taiwan.
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Deaflympics Parade
Beijing gets the Olympics. Taipei gets the Deaflympics. Or is that being unfair?
Anyway, some sort of opening ceremony was passing by at the end of my street, so I grabbed my camera and was met with a Batman-esque (Tim Burton vintage) floating barrage balloon parade. Sports shoes, frogs, sea horses … and all guarded by a team of Star Wars’ Storm Troopers. It just makes so much sense.
Frog (the mascot) I understand (although why choose a frog? What do they have to do with hearing impairment?) Training shoe; I understand. Sea horse? …
Storm Troopers. Yup.
Storm Troopers avec floating training shoe. Use the force!
These are not the droids you are looking for. -
Playing with Wolfram Alpha
Spending an hour or so playing with Wolfram Alpha – the new darling of the internet world. Google’s intellectual cousin? It doesn’t seem to impressed by many of my questions …
Hmmmm … will play with it some more some time.
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Wulai – Sanxia Hike
Suited and bootedAfter finding the rather great hiking blog, Pashan, we were inspired to go and trek pastures new around Wulai. It’s Labour Day weekend here, and the weather has just been impeccable for the whole time, so no excuses could be found not to strap on the boots and get motoring.
Indian Jones-style bridges.
Abe illustrates his bike-handling skills.The hike was well graded, and punctuated by groups of improbably old Taiwanese hikers coming the other way. It’s a sad fact, but hikers that we bump into tend to be old, and complain that the youth today are not interested in Hiking. Although I usually take these types of comments with a grain of salt (‘in my day…’), I have to say I agree. However, I do hold out hope that in the grand rollercoaster of Taiwanese trends, hiking will follow folding bikes in rising popularity – perhaps it will be some local tech GPS gadget that kicks it off – who knows.
After reading the Pashan article, detailing the Sanxia-Wulai Trail, we did manage to get one minor detail wrong… the starting point. As a result, the fantsatic diving pools ‘in the first third of the trail’ were not quite where we expected them to be, but no matter; we’ll be back soon to do it properly. Here is a map of the starting point / ending point:
View Wulai – Sanxia Hike in a larger map
Team Taipei
Air conditioning for whom?After the hike, we headed straight for the smoked chicken roadside restaurant, and devoured all manner of vegetables and delicious bird. It then did not take an enormous amount of persuasion from Tasha to head to Gonguan and rather a special chocolate shop, where we each ordered a brownie large enough for 12 people. Food coma. Bed.
Link to my Flickr set for Wulai-Sanxia
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Birthday Redux
It’s useful being friends with designers and photographers; they have a habit of injecting that extra element of quality into capturing events. In my case, I was lucky enough to have Abe shooting away on his rig, and Gerhard & Klara mounting their time-lapse cam in the corner of the room – lovely.
http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=71377
Kicking off proceedings was dinner at my favourite local ‘restaurant’ – the getto shrimp van at the end of the street. We grabbed, wine glasses, bread and candles, and created a few raised eyebrows, dining to the sounds of music and shrimps being fried with a hairdryer. As the parking lot filled up, we decamped to the apartment, where a super spread of friends gathered to wish me well as I successfully managed to circumnabulate the Sun 30 times.On top of that, I am now the proud owner of a 20″ Apple Cinema display, which is significantly more pleasant to work on – to the point that I am pretty sure I am processing more photos for upload to Flickr now, and the blog. Awesome.
Nick and I discuss vases
Really special to have the HK crew in town. Appreciated!
Candlelit / neon – lit supper
Strike a pose.
Onizou Idea Nomads in Town
Shrimp pots.
A very special cooking style – eat your heart out, Heston.
Make a wish!
The team.
Champers.
After managing to offload this trash to Sam last year, it managed to find its way back here. Someone will pay for this! -
Hiking Yangmingshan in the Rain
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=70933
It’s been a great couple of weeks of visitors, with Gerhard & Klara in town, touching down in Taipei as part of the Onizou world tour. Do take some time to check their web site at www.onizou.com to see the things they are up to, and the places they plan to go.
We hiked up into the clouds below the peak of Yangming Mountain to sample the sights of the volcano and smells of the hot springs on the other side. Super good fun, and great to get into nature on foot rather than wheels.
Village on a hillside looks Italian (from a few miles away, at least)
Cooling off after hot spring action
The team waiting to get back to Taipei, and eat Pizza! -
30
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=70933
Blimey … I am 30!
And you know what? It feels pretty good. This is in no small part due to the amazing efforts of my friends, especially Abe who put quite some effort into setting things up, and Tanja & Michael who jetted over from Hong Kong to join us. Biking, partying, eating and hot springing – just like the old days! Cheers everyone; it was magic.
Tanja approaches with caution
Cables haven’t moved.
Preening and Prodding
The coolest old man.
Perspectives.
Changing Rooms
Feet.As you might notice from the box at the top, I am also jumping into Flickr, after years of not really diving into it. The new camera rather warrants more than 410 pixel-wide images. Speaking of which, it is becoming increasingly clear that I might need to think about transitioning to a new format that supports better photos. I’ll need to give that some thought.
More birthday photos and videos on the way, as I sort them out.
Come check out Jonathan Biddle on Flickr!
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Doggles
While I recover from another weekend, I thought I would post the most appropriate photo taken by Michael while waiting at traffic lights, that sums up the weekend … like he says, in Taipei, you don’t need to go looking for crazy things, the crazy things come to you.
More photos on the way soon.
Doggles. My new word. And happy birthday to me! -
Taipei Mega Architecture
Intersections.I live pretty much slap bang downtown in Taipei, and I am forever amazed at the scale of my local motorway at the end of the street. The thing is, they posted it up on stilts, so it really does the double trick of magically disappearing and providing an incredible space right in the centre of the city. It also seems to be lit professionally, although I suspect that was more by accident than design.
Anyway, on my way back from my semi-regular trips to the computer market, I thought I would take a few photos.
Stairway to heaven
Painting on the ceiling with light.
Cathedral of the Automobile
Juicy couture. And home. -
Hong Kong Sevens
The Hong Kong Sevens – carnival of the Rugby world – landed in Hong Kong the same weekend as me, but I managed to assemble my own team to compete with anything they had to offer.
As is customary when I visit Hong Kong, I seem to gather an improbable number of friends and family members together in one place at the same time – belying perhaps how quiet life really is these days. On this trip in question, my Mum & Dad were travelling back from New Zealand, Anke, Lars and Linnéa were en-route to/from Taiwan, Sam from England dropped by for a beer, and of course Tanja & Michael were on hand to provide the floor and great hospitality. Adding to the melée were Geoff and Kipp (designers from HK) and Kai (designer from Germany). So, that sorted dinner out then.
We managed to squeeze one of most activities into 72 hours – hiking for those craving nature and escape, shopping and urban safari for Mum & Dad who spent the last six weeks staring at mountains and sand flies, and for myself a great window to spend some time with the team. Well, multiple teams, it seems. Intense and exhausting as ever; but brilliantly exhilirating all the same.
Michael in the house / on the bus.
Mum on a boat – we headed out for hiking in the really rather remarkable national park. Minutes away from Hong Kong, and you are dropped in wilderness (almost).
Dad in wide-angle mode.
Hellooo!
Okay, so maybe wilderness is stretching it a bit. But we did see some Scouts.
Tanja and Kipp chat on the beach.
Anke, radiant.
G’day Mum! Oh – you mean they don’t say that in New Zealand?
First of about 500 shots of Linnéa in the sea (for the first time?). She seemed to enjoy it almost as much as us!
Legless.
Soaring
Lunch in the surf shacks.On Sunday, we spent the day cruising the stomping grounds of Tanja & Michael: up in the north of the city near the flower, bird and fish markets. I visited there a few years ago, so it was great to go back, and indeed it’s nice to know they live in such a vibrant area. Always fun to walk around. And so we did, indluging in a bit of light retail therapy on the way (or I did at least).
Bag o’ fish?
Out like a trout (funnily enough, at this precise second, I am listening to Mr. Scruff’s ‘The Fish Song’)
Geoff checks the LASER-ETCHED FISH. Yes, those are Chinese symbols on the side! I’ll try that with the cats.
Miffies!
Airing the house
Shoes for a dog … or twins!
Bird’s life
Widescreen
Apartments for sale
Wherever you go in Asia (or the world?) you’ll always find groups of men doing improbable things with their spare time. Is life with their wife that hard? I supposed throwing yourself off a mountain on a bike is much the same.
Forever amazed by the scaffolding.
Linnéa seems as bemused as me.