Tag: Ximen


  • I had a nice walk in the spring sunshine today to Ximen. I saw rather an interesting shop sliding door which caught my eye. Initially, I thought it was for accupuncture, but it turns out it was for a fortune teller. Essentially, palm-reading … but with your face. Each point, marked with a Chinese character,…

  • Rather a beautiful temple roof detail, don’t you agree? Roof Detail The story of a British Industrial Designer in Taiwan…

  • A voice like sandpaper singing songs of painful death (I think) I met this fella singing his heart out on his portable bike-mounted Karaoke system. Karaoke gets everywhere in Taiwan, people are surprisingly good and it is a massively popular way to spend a Friday night. For this guy, though, he is unlikely to find…

  • 3 weeks of constant rain is getting everyone down at the moment – especially as our office has no heating. It’s funny, I lived in Scotland for four years, but somehow the cold combined with the humidity means nothing ever quite dries properly. Still, it makes a great excuse for excursions to hot springs. In…

  • This coffee was so bad it was worth taking a photo. It was completely undrinkable. You can see the Hundreds and Thousands sprinkled on the top, which I have no real problem with. No, it was the white sugar slime that is usually found on top of cheap cakes in the 1970s that was so…

  • Ximen

    One of Lorenzo’s first nights out (new Swiss member of our team). Here is Ximen – Taipei’s mini Tokyo… and possibly the coolest taxi I have ever seen. On the way to the bar, and testing out a new 2 megapixel cameraphone… and look how happy I am. What is hard to realise is the…