I’ve been travelling in South Taiwan for the past few days and I didn’t get the chance to update my blog. So today and tomorrow I decided to sit down and take it easy, this will allow me to relax my feet after a lot of walking.
Taipei is a huge city, and as much as I think I saw everything I always find myself I still haven’t seen something. The population of Taipei metro area is close to 7 million, and just to give you some perspective, that’s the equivalent of the whole population of the province of Quebec.
Before I went to south Taiwan I spent some time in Taipei going into some more sites and landmarks. I visited the Grand Hotel which is really different than usual hotels. It was built in the 1950s but the main building was completed in early 1970s. I saw the Grand hotel the first day when I was coming from Taipei International Airport but I didn’t know that it was a hotel because the building from outside did not look like the usual hotels I am used to.
After visiting the hotel I stopped by Taipei Fine Arts museum and Flora Expo. Flora Expo is a big expo here in Taipei; it’s a way to show different flowers from Taiwan and to promote the floral industry. I didn’t attend the expo because I am not too much into that type of expositions. While at the Taipei Fine Arts museum I enjoyed a photography exposition about the history of Taiwan.
Early in the day I visited Daan Park or as it’s known to the locals the Central park, very similar to the Central Park in Manhattan, NY. There are many shops and coffee shops similar to what you would see in Paris or Manhattan. Next to the park is also the Grand mosque of Taipei, with the cost of construction was funded in part by the Shah of Iran and late king of Jordan.
In the evening I went out for a dinner at a nice organic vegetarian restaurant in Neihu near the Neihu software park. I don’t know if I mentioned this before but Taiwan and especially Taipei has many of the best known companies in high tech such as; HTC, ACER, ASUS, Gigabyte Technology, D-link, Foxconn (the company that manufacture the iPhones and the iPad for Apple) and many others. Most of them are located in software parks such as Neihu and Nangang.
