Yesterday I went to the top of Taipai 101, the world’s tallest building (or was, tallest-building-ness seems to change often).
Coming out from an older, tighter, more crowded area of Taipai to the city hall area of Taipai 101 makes quite a contrast. The T101 area is wide open, cleared out, rather people-less areas of modern, planned grandeur. Not a really good stage to be on.
Oddly enough, one of the building’s real claims to fame works against it, too. The elevator zips up to the 500 meter top in about 30 seconds. Really, really fast. Inside the elevator the ceiling has LED’d stars and comet to keep us entertained. The elevator operator has just enough time for a very quick comment in two languages before the trip is over. There is *no* feeling of movement. Just a slight nudge, maybe. So, though the thing is moving 400 meters per minute, top end, according to the speedo, it seems like nothing is happening. And then you’re there.
Overcast, so the audio players’ descriptions of the far sights were imaginary. Nearby, though, it is kinda cool to look way, way down on 20 story buildings. The top of the building is at low airplane heights and feels it.
Anyway, it’s something to do. 🙂
Have not had any luck finding pro teacher for Mandarin, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for the moment, as I’ve found an alternate – the women who has the place I’m staying. The good side is that she enjoys this sort of thing (her husband is Mexican so she’s used to it). The down side is that as soon as I finish getting these files off the camera, I gotta do my homework – accost 10 people outside and get them to read and listen to me say a paper full of simple words/phrases.
In other words, I have the feeling that she’s a tough teacher. 🙂
Had a fun time talking philo/polictico with two people here yesterday. We covered Irish Gypsies (unRomanish “gypsies”), Swedish small business, and the usual things. Irish guy, Swedish girl. Oh, and we got some asperagus juice in the grocery store. Kinda sweat.
I wrote a script to automatically move over and rename your uploaded pictures. I’ll continue after every post you make here and gallerizing them. Links will be posted on the sidebar.
It seems like a waste, but uploading to both steak (for archiving) and flickr (for a better viewing experience) seems optimal…
I’ll just upload to asuka. I really don’t know whether the flickr upload worked, and it’s a bit too much of a fight. The pictures will get more raw. I got pretty easy-going about shooting today in the hopes that upload speed will be much better with fewer viruses on this machine. Might be a vain hope, though. Saw the bandwidth being used later last night again by “something”. Probably something shooting out emails. 🙂