The final tasty leg of my Asian journey this time around was a
week in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Taiwan is in a rather unusual
and interesting political situation at the moment. While mainland
China still considers it to be a province of China, many people in
Taiwan want to it to become an independent country. Over the 1990s the
government of Taiwan has become a democracy and the country’s economy
grew immensely (a bit like Ireland’s), however Taiwan does not have a
seat in the UN and the People’s republic of China (ie, mainland China)
apparently have lots of missiles pointed at Taiwan, ready to fire if
they claim independence. I’m not going to go into too much of the
history here but it’s well worth checking out in Wikipedia!

The biggest effect of the above delicate political situation on me
was the fact that there are no direct flights from Shanghai to Taiwan!
To fly to Taiwan I had to fly back to Hong Kong first of all and from
there fly to Taipei. Also, in Shanghai airport when I asked if they’d
change my Chinese money to Taiwan money they laughed me out of the
exchange place. But these were just niggling details, and as Hong Kong
airport is one of the nicest, cleanest, best and most efficient
airport I’ve ever been in, I didn’t mind another brief visit. (they
even have free wireless!)

My trip to Taiwan was mostly for work, but I did manage to squeeze
in a bit of sightseeing. The Taipei 101 building was the first obvious
thing to check out, at 509 metres high it’s currently the tallest
skyscraper in the world and has one hundred and one floors. It also
looks pretty funky! For some reason though, perhaps because of its
shape or maybe because of the lack of high skyscrapers in the
surrounding area, it doesn’t seem that high when you’re near it. As
in, when I was in Shanghai I saw lots of skinnier skyscrapers beside
each other and they felt “higher” in my mind than the Taipei 101
building. Surely it’s some optical trick of the mind. Anyway, Taipei
101 is a cool looking skyscraper, has lots of fancy shops, cafes and
restaurants inside and is well worth a visit. From the top you get a
fabulous view of Taipei (obviously) and they have the fastest lift in
the world which made my ears pop like crazy.

Taipei struck me as slightly more “western” than Shanghai,
especially when it came to the nightclubs I visited. The first one I
checked out was called Pasoul, I passed by it by accident on
a Wednesday night and saw a polite queue of dressed up and attractive
Taipei kids so decided to join the queue myself. At this point I need to digress slightly and talk about, yes you guessed it, the ladies. Taipei girls are the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen in my entire life ever, and due to some kind of national female clothes material shortage or something they all insist on wearing either super tiny miniskirts or hotpants. I do not exaggerate, these women are eye poppingly attractive. Pasoul on a Wednesday night seemed to be some kind of student night, and like many clubs in Taipei the bar was free! You were given a ticket on the way in, you swap this for any drink you like (off a big list) and then when you finish that drink you bring up the empty glass and swap it for another one. A venue full of teenage supermodels and free booze, this would have been the nightclub of my dreams if it wasn’t for the horrible soul destroying mainstream American chart “hip-hop” (it’s fake hip-hop really!). I’m pretty sure the DJ played every Gwen Stefani track in existence, mixed into 50cent, and whatever other crap is in the charts right now. What is it with Asians and this pretend hip-hop? They lap it up for some reason!

Still, with a free bar and me being Irish it was hard not to have fun. One amazing thing was the orderly queue for drinks at the bar, which got a bit long at times so while I was sitting at the bar and had finished my seventh white Russian I motioned to a pair of lads who were just at the top of the queue to get me another one, which they did! I was then introduced to a large group of their stunningly attractive lady friends and spent the rest of the night pretending I was five years younger than I actually am while trying to get my fringe to cover my receding hairline as best I could. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me as this particular club which is a shame as it was the best fun I had in Taipei, despite the aural pollution I had to endure.

Other highlights of Taipei included a visit to the nightmarket which was great, it had exactly the right amount of seediness, weirdness and illegality to make it interesting. One rather illegal activity that happens there is the killing of live snakes and extraction of their blood for people to drink. Obviously I had to try it, and would up eating some snake too! There were a few of these snake restaurants, full of cages of snakes obviously. The one across from my one had a huge python in a cage in front of the restaurant and a guy was feeding it two live rabbits! When drinking snakes blood they mix it into some kind of liquor for you, and they also give you a glass of “snake venom” (or maybe snake bile?) and a glass of “antidote” (I didn’t see them squeeze the snake venom/bile out of the snake though, I bet it’s not really what they say it is. The blood is authentic though!

On Friday night I went to another nightclub, this one was called 9 Percent, we had actually tried to get in here on another day buy I wasn’t let in because I didn’t have any ID! (that’s the first time I’ve been asked for ID to prove my age in about ten years!) They obviously could tell I was over eighteen, but they’re pretty strict on having ID, probably due to the police checking up on them every so often or what have you. Club 9 Percent was pretty much the same deal as Pasoul, free bar, place full of scantily clad Asian goddesses, at this place some of them were dancing on the bar and stripping (it was PG-13 stripping though), at one point when two girls were dancing on the bar I whipped out the camera to record a video, the DJ then made an announcement over the mic in English saying: “Could the guy taking photos please stop as it’s not allowed!”, so I put my camera back and gave him a friendly wave. I took a few more sly photos and videos anyway later on so in your face you rubbish DJ!

The music policy was exactly the same as in Pasoul, I also didn’t have as much fun at this place, probably because the music was even worse somehow. I swear to flippin’ Jesus, the DJ played this (fake) hip-hop track which is probably called “Mystery Girl” (that’s one lyric they kept repeating) four times. FOUR TIMES! The same track! *buries head in hands* Once again though the free bar was a great consolation prize to fall back on!

I had a good search through some Taiwan forums and things and found a few English speaking ones, the general consensus from these is that techno doesn’t exist over there, and pretty much all clubs play the same bad pop music, a few play some bad house music too (there’s a big club called Luxy I didn’t go to, but it’s like the Tripod of Taipei apparently, they get some progressive house acts over apparently *shudder*). A very interesting city however, which I’d like to see more of some time.

Here are my photos from Taipei.

And some videos: Girls dancing on stage and a DJ telling me to put my camera away

Girls dancing on a bar

Taipei Lovely Ladies Competition (on top of a bar)

I want to marry that girl in black there, hot girl in black if you’re reading this please fly to Ireland, I live in Fairview!

Bad bad bad music, and the crowd goes wild!

So that concludes my China/Taiwan write-up! I know there wasn’t really much electro or techno related shenanigans to report but boy have I got that sorted as I’m writing this while waiting in the airport for my flight to Detroit where I’m going to the Flippin’ DEMF Festival where everybody in the world is playing! My head is spinning just thinking about it right now. So check back soon for a full review and 1 gig xD memory card’s worth of photos and videos. Seeya soon!