Posts

In addition to their reputation for novelty foods, night markets in Taiwan also offer an almost endless variety of cheap goods, particularly clothing and accessories. Some of the fast, low-cost garments found at Taiwanese night markets are amusing, quirky, provocative, bizarre, or even incoherent, though some of it is also quite clever. My understanding is that many of the more unusual products originates in China, where massive factories churn out garments emblazoned with English text and pop culture references without regard for semantic meaning. This is almost certainly the result of copying passages from print or online media, using machine translation, or sheer laziness, but it might also be for aesthetic effect. Transcription errors are common, particularly when popular designs are copied by competing factories. Observed on the scale of years there is something almost evolutionary at work in night market fashion—styles mutate and are subject to a kind of natural selection. To celebrate the absurdity of this curious cultural phenomena I have assembled about 40 photos from my many visits to the night markets of Taiwan. Enjoy!

Last summer I embarked upon a weeklong bicycle tour in the deep south of Taiwan. I began in Tainan, cycled through Kaohsiung to Pingtung City, spent a day hanging out, and then continued on to Fangliao, where the coastal plain narrows to a thin wedge between the mountains and the sea. There is only one road leading south from here—which meant I covered a lot of ground I had already seen while riding all around Taiwan in 2013. I didn’t mind repeating that beautiful stretch of coastline and, actually, I was looking forward to checking out some places I had breezed by on that first big tour, particularly in Fangshan and Hengchun.

After spending a day riding around Pingtung City I was ready to hit the road again. With no specific destination in mind—only an intention to head in the direction of Hengchun, far to the south—I checked out of the vintage homestay I lodged at the previous night, stopped at Eske Place Coffee House for a delicious and healthy vegetarian breakfast, changed into cycling wear, and exited the city to the east. I knew almost nothing about where I was headed or what I might see on the third day of my southern Taiwan ride in 2015. I only had one stop planned in advance: a hospital in Chaozhou rumoured to be abandoned. I didn’t know it at the time but I would spend almost the entire day riding through the historic Hakka belt of Pingtung.

One of the pleasures of bicycle touring in Taiwan is the freedom to change plans on impulse. On my second day of a trip down south in June 2015, having previously cycled across Kaohsiung from Tainan, I opted to hang out and see more of Pingtung City. A dire weather forecast calling for bouts of torrential rain had already introduced some uncertainty, but I was also curious about this city of 200,000, about which almost nothing is written in English. Finding an interesting place to stay sealed the deal—and so I checked out of a grimy hotel near the railway station after breakfast, moved my stuff to the new place, and spent the day exploring the administrative center of Pingtung, the southernmost division of Taiwan.

Bicycle touring is one of the best ways to experience Taiwan. I don’t have an opportunity to go touring as much as I’d like but managed to find some time last year, in June of 2015, to embark upon a multi-day bicycle trip around southern Taiwan. My intention was to cover some of the same territory that I had rushed through on my first bicycle trip down south in 2013. I ended up racing a typhoon from Kenting to Taitung City that year—so the chance to explore the backroads of Pingtung at a more relaxed pace really appealed to me. I started my journey in Tainan, my favourite city in Taiwan, and cycled through Kaohsiung to Pingtung City, putting about 70 kilometers behind me. Gathered here are some photos from the first day of this trip, continued here.

Road safety dummies are a distinctive feature of the streets of Taiwan. In Chinese they are generally known as engineering dummies (工程用假人), warning dummies (警示假人), or, more formally, electric flag-bearers (電動旗手). According to law these robotic figures must be setup at all roadside construction sites to provide some measure of protection for workers as well as warn passing motorists and pedestrians of potential hazards. When hooked up to a car battery their stubby arms pump up and down, waving flags and other objects to direct traffic. Construction companies typically decorate these dummies with safety vests and hardhats, though it is not common for workers to express some creativity and personalize their dummies. Some of them even have individual names and histories! The rest of this post features photographs of some of the many road safety dummies I have encountered over the years.

Download

1800 × 1200

Recently my work on this site was featured in an article by Nien Ping Yu (于念平) for the Chinese language web magazine BIOS Monthly. The article, loosely translated as Canadian Cultural Blogger: Even Unremarkable Places Have History (加拿大文化部落客: 再平凡的地方都有歷史), was based on a sprawling conversation we had in person rather than an email questionnaire. Mostly we spoke about themes and practices commonly seen on this blog: discovering history through the exploration of lost and neglected places, revealing intriguing connections through observations of synchronicity, and using photography as a documentarian medium rather than focusing solely on aesthetic appeal.

I resided in Zhongli, Taoyuan, for two months at the very end of 2015 for reasons outlined in my first dispatch. In short: I wanted to try out living in another city in Taiwan and had a few good friends in the area, one of whom is fellow Canadian blogger Josh Ellis. In my time in Zhongli I captured numerous scenes from everyday life in this burgeoning conurbation of half a million. This post is meant to convey a sense of what it was like to live there for a while—just as I previously did for my time in Wenshan District, Taipei. It is not meant to be a comprehensive guide or a review; think of this as a loose collection of snapshots and impressions of a mid-sized Taiwanese city not commonly documented in English.

Yesterday I was on my way to check out 1933 Shanghai (上海1933老场坊), a restored Art Deco slaughterhouse in Hongkou, when I stumbled upon a compact neighbourhood in the process of being torn down, part of an ongoing process of urban renewal in Shanghai. Every year more of these old areas are torn down, their residents forcibly evicted, new high-rises and shopping malls going up in their place. My time in Shanghai is too short to allow for any measure of expertise to grow—so all I have to share here are a few photos and some comments from a quick walk around (and through) the block.

During my weeklong trip to Manila late last year I ventured into Binondo and Quiapo to check out some of the famous old Art Deco buildings in the area. Along the way I also visited Paco Railway Station (entirely by accident) and the Manila Metropolitan Theater. Presented here are an assortment of other pre-war buildings from the early 20th century, annotated with links to more information.