Taipei
First published in 2016
Do you know this feeling: You’re going to a city you’ve never been to before with very little time on your hands, you know what you want to shoot and how to get there. Then the weather changes and you’re left with a rainy day. Not with one of these great skies and gorgeous light rains - just gray in gray with some short breaks in between.
I arrived in Taipei very late on Saturday and just had Sunday off. The weather forecast said that it should start to rain during the afternoon, but the reality was it started just when I left the hotel. The metro system in Taipei is great and the price of a day-ticket is a no-brainer. So I decided to give it a try, even knowing that I would not take a lot of pictures and most probably different ones than I had in mind.
I started with the Longshan Temple. This one is in the southern part of the old city and it’s one of the most colorful temples I’ve seen. Everything looks as if it was pained yesterday and the tables can hardly carry all the flowers (later I figured out that this seems to be more the norm than the exception).
It started to rain harder but there are always places you can use as a shelter. A lot of people came to pray and only very few that seem to be tourists. In fact, I saw not a single western face even I’ve been in the temple for more than an hour.
Right next to the temple is the Herbal Medicine Lane, but obviously, it was still too early and all the shops had been closed. I was wondering what to do and decided just to stroll through the streets heading more or less north.
The aim was to go to the Talungtung district where you can find the Dalongdong and the Confucius Temple. The Dalongdong Temple is again very colorful and nicely decorated (don’t miss the garden on the other side of the street), while the Confucius Temple is much more strict. Interestingly only a few people had been in the Confucius Temple (mainly tourists by the way), but a lot were visiting the Dalongdong Temple.
After visiting both, I grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and decided that’s time for a shower. But I returned later and that’s where the night shot at the top is from.
