As I alluded to in this past Streets Saturday post, I had to make a brief emergency trip back to the States. I really didnt have the time to do the things that I would normally want to do with a camera, like walk the Venice Boardwalk or hit the Santa Monica Pier, but I did have my trusty camera and mobile phone with me.
So, photos were taken and here they are:
In Taiwan, strawberries are a winter fruit. Miaoli County, which sits south of Taipei, is the center of the strawberry universe. Every weekend dozens of tourist busses leave from Taipei Main Station filled with agro-tourists ready to strip the farms bare of anything with even the slightest red tinge followed by a stop off at the center of Miaoli City for some strawberry wine, strawberry ice cream, strawberries over shaved ice drowned in condensed milk, strawberry smoothies, strawberry candies, … you get the idea. There are even strawberry-flavored corn dogs and Taiwanese sausages.
A couple days ago I published an article about a recent trip to Houtong Village, a.k.a. the Cat Village, which was only a 30 minute train ride away from Taipei city. I love taking the train outside of the city and to any of the smaller stations in the more rural areas of the country. While surface traffic and the evergrowing need for real estate means that most TRA stations in Taipei city are underground, rural stations are by-in-large out in the open air with minimal cover just in case the weather turns rainy.
What do you do if you are the village one train stop down from a very popular tourist-trail village? You come up with a hook to snag some of that tourist traffic. In this case, Houtong Village sits on the next stop past where anyone going to Pingxi to float some paper lanterns or Shifen to see the waterfall would exit.
The hook they came up with? Cats.
In 2010, the city of Taipei played host to the World Flora Exhibition and while most of the exhibits were disassembled at the conclusion of that exhibition a few of the more popular ones remain. The Dreams Pavilion, located in Xinsheng Park, is one of these. The Dreams Pavilion is essentially a series of multimedia, interactive art installations set in a series of connected gallery spaces. All of the installations share a floral theme and interact with visitors in different ways, usually via photosensors or an RFID bracelet handed out at the entrance.
Before anything, I must apologize. You will not find any pictures of fireflies here. I tried, I really did. There were thousands of them flying about. The problem was that there was no outside lighting and no flashes allowed. Flashlights were permitted so that people wouldnt trip on the uneven ground, but they could only be pointed down and had to be covered with red cellophane (insects generally see in the higher wavelengths of the light spectrum, like UV, so red light would be invisible to them).
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