Taipei Life

Youbike is an initiative from the Taipei local government that wouldn't really work in many other places. Bikes are sequestered in racks with electronic locks and sensor boards at many popular areas in and around the city, often in parks or by metro stations. The map shows hundreds of stations with each one listing bikes and parking spaces in real time. The bikes themselves are pretty sturdy and are regularly maintained by a dedicated team of servicemen and the banks of electronic sensors and locks are serviced regularly as well. The whole system works without a hitch and we enjoyed our first rides on this long weekend, catching the train down to Yuanshan Station, retrieving our bikes using our transport "Easycards" and taking the bikes out for a few hours on the riverside bike paths. When we returned it was as simple as snapping the bikes back into their locking stations, waving the easycard over the sensor and reading the withdrawal amount (which was NT$30, the equivalent of one Australian dollar!)

I can't think how the various logistics of this operation could possibly work in our hometown or country. The advanced electronics, the cost, the maintenance, the payment system, the infrastructure, the "safety" factors (no helmets needed in Taipei), the bikes, the servicing, the protection from damage etc. etc. I imagine any of these factors would prove to be an insurmountable challenge back home. I'd hate to think what might become of expensive and delicate electronic equipment and payment kiosks if positioned throughout the city in parks or by railway stations. We can take a bike here with no deposit, just an honour system that we'll return it to one of the docking stations in the city within 24 hours....think that would work?(!)

Anyway, suffice to say that we had a really fun experience on Taiwan's national day on Thursday and Cass tested her healing pelvis out on a good long ride through the riverside paths all the way to Neihu and return. We stopped for drinks and photos here and there, didn't ride too fast and thoroughly enjoyed our Youbikes. There is a kiosk and racks being set up just around the corner from us in the ShiDong Park awaiting their shiny new battalion of Youbikes , so soon we'll have even better access to them.

On Friday we took the car out to the coast with a dim prospect of some surf, but an ethereal curtain of soupy fog along with dribbling skies and whipping gusts of wind on the top of the mountain certainly dampened our enthusiasm. As it turned out, and is often the case, the fog lifted as we made our way down the other side of the mountain but the wind-whipped coast thwarted any hope of a surf. We decided to travel along the coastal highway and we stopped at a few places we'd previously just whizzed by. A peculiar nest of home-made "beehive" style houses were intriguing, and we got as close as we could without trespassing. They were so tiny and strange: we wondered who could possibly have built them and who lived there now. The Ju Ming museum on top of the mountain had inspired some coastal sculpture installations, so we stopped and had a look at them as well.

Years ago, in pre-car days, we'd travelled to a strip of sand out near Sanji which has since been infested with a motley row of cafes and eating/drinking houses, most replicating each other in terms of basic pastas and burgers. We stopped at one, "Share", for lunch and had the place to ourselves. We settled near the big picture window, had some tasty burgers and coffees while watching the comical efforts of a local entrepreneur on a low powered jet-ski trying to tow a "banana" full of life jacket-trussed beachgoers from one end of the beach to the other....pisse weake worlde sprang to mind!

On Saturday we decided to check out the much hyped new space movie, Gravity, over at the under-new-management movie theatre near our place, the formerly known as Miramar, now "Wovie" cinemas. I've got an app in Chinese which I can read for movie titles and times, but we can't buy online for the moment, necessitating an earlier trip over to buy the tickets. It was visually epic and we could appreciate the technical marvels exhibited, but the two main characters we thought were miscast, and the whole suspension of disbelief had to ramped up to stratospheric levels to cope with the loose plotline. We usually rely on Metacritic to pre-judge our viewing pleasure and we rarely disagree, but this time we did. We'd give it a B+ only. Chili's for a late lunch and Cass was in heaven!

Sunday was a lazy day and I managed to watch a great slab of the Bathurst 1000 on live streaming in HD, and I even had to do some marking of the new language portfolios we've been tasked with assembling and grading on each of the kids in our program. Cass met her quota of essays on Of Mice and Men so she's happy with her progress....she's got 45 more to go!

Photos: Cass blissing at Chili's, Youbike shots, beehive houses and a lazy lunch at "Share". There's a short video of Cass on bike here and a slightly longer one at this link....I somehow managed to juggle the phone while riding along!