Author: Jan

Seattle: Rainfurrest convention (aside)

So last weekend I was taking a motorcycle course near the Sea-Tac airport, where the classroom portion was in a hotel conference room.

It turns out that the hotel was the overflow hotel for the Rainfurrest (“furry camping”) weekend, and I did see a few people with animal tails and/or full animal suits on (alas on photos). It reminded me of a CSI episode where a murder happens at a similar anthropomorphic convention (i.e. people in animal costumes). Trippy.

And yes, I did pass the motorcycle course, thank you. Though a scooter is easier and thus more fun for now.

NYC: subway/train expansion

On a recent flight, I watched a show called “Build it Bigger” – this episode was about NYC which is doing a $15 billion expansion/renovation of the subway and train systems in Manhattan (to be done by 2015). I hadn’t heard of this before.

  1. They are building a new subway under 2nd Ave.
  2. They are building a new east-west midtown Manhattan subway line.
  3. They are expanding Grand Central Station… underneath it! Both a new concourse and new platforms.
  4. They are building a new train tunnel from Long Island to Grand Central Station (so trains can go there instead of the less convenient Penn Station, since most commuters want to get to midtown)
  5. They are also building/improving system interchanges

Some cool stats (remembered reasonably accurately but don’t quote me on it J

  • The subway system is almost 100 years old (started in 1913)
  • The subway system started as 3 competing systems
  • Grand Central Station (GCS from now on) is the busiest train station in the world
  • 750,000 people pass through GCS every day (on 750 trains)
  • There are 400 miles of subway and train tunnels in NYC (20 subway lines and a few train lines)
  • The new train tunnel to GCS will add another 150 trains and 250,000 commuters per day to GCS
  • What slows people down in the stations/interchanges is not having a clear line of sight (and signage) to know where they are going, so in some places they are adding support beams to the ceiling so that they can get rid of support columns in the middle of the “hallway”

Some of the construction feats are cool:

  • Literally underneath GCS, they are building a huge new concourse with soaring ceiling, in such a way that you can’t feel or hear anything up in GCS
  • The new train tunnels to GCS are being bored as 4 smaller tunnels that are then joined by exploding the rock in between them (while also adding support beams)

Seattle: lottery tickets

Why is there a scratch-off lottery kiosk in the airport? State-providing gambling is ok, but online poker is illegal…

On a related note: while channel surfing, I recently saw a show about lottery winners, and before a commercial they’d pose a question that got answered afterwards. In particular, 2 such questions/stats caught my eye (these may be a little inaccurate now, but you get the gist):

Q: How much do Americans spend on lottery tickets every week? A:$300 million (equals $15 billion per year)

Q: How much is paid out in lottery winnings each week? A: $100 million (note this means only 35% of ticket purchases is paid out as winnings)

 

Taipei: Random food photos

Here are some random food photos from around Taipei (some I ate, some I just saw):

More MRT signs (Taipei metro)

More signs in the Taipei metro:

Taipei: Night market food photos

Here are some photos taken at various night markets in Taipei:

Taipei metro (MRT)

I can definitely see how Taipei would have been a nightmare to travel around in before the MRT was built. The first line opened in 1996, with most of the current system open by 2000 (though they keep expanding it – see their expansion plans). About 4 years ago the metro was flooded after a tsunami; the Taipei Main Station was under 2m of water and it took 3 months to restore the system to normal.

The MRT is very user- (and tourist-) friendly:

  • It’s fast, clean, safe and orderly
  • Virtually all signs have English below the Mandarin
  • Station names are listed in Mandarin and Pinyin (i.e. western letters) everywhere
  • Announcements are made in Mandarin (and Taiwanese and Hakka) and English
  • Fares are distance-based, ranging from NT$20/US$0.70 to NT$65/US$2.25
  • The EasyCard is a smart-chip credit-card sized (but thin) pass you buy at vending machines, for either NT$300/US$10 or NT$500/$17, of which NT$100/US$3.50 is a deposit on the card.
  • You can use machines to check the balance and add cash value to the card
  • At the end of your trip, you return the card to a kiosk or attendant and get back your NT$100 deposit plus any remaining unused value
  • Using an EasyCard gives a discount (20% I think) on the normal fares – so a short NT$20/US$0.70 ride is only NT$16/US$0.55!
  • To pay for a ride, you tap the card on a reader when entering the station, and again on exit; both times it shows you your balance, and on exit it shows the fare that was calculated. No need to figure out yourself how much to pay
  • The EasyCard is much easier than the token, where you figure out your fare, put your money in a machine, and get a token that you then use on entry/exit (and it keeps the token on exit)
  • They even have break-a-bill machines (e.g. for an NT$1000/US$35 bill from the ATM, you get 3 choices, of which the most convenient for me was 1xNT$500, 4xNT$100 and 2xNT$50 coins
  • The washrooms are very clean, and are often both inside and outside the paid zone
  • There is no eating or drinking in the paid zone (though water bottles seem ok)
  • The subway car door locations are painted on the platform, sometimes with form-a-line here indicators at busier stations
  • Transfers between subway lines have easy to follow signs (again, in Mandarin and English)
  • They are still expanding the system, eventually all the way to Taoyuan (airport TPE, which was almost an hour away by bus)
  • Exits are lettered/numbered for convenience (some larger multi-line stations can have 20 exits!)
  • Nice big area maps by the exits (only thing missing was a scale!)
  • You can also use your EasyCard at some retailers, like 7-11

Another useful feature of the metro is the nearly-free sightseeing provided by the above ground portions (a trick I’ve used in other cities like Bangkok):

  • The entire brown line (except around the local Songshan airport station)
  • The red line north of Yuanshan (inc. the Shilin night market and all the way to Danshui/Tamshui)
  • Spur line Beitou – Xinbeitou (“new Beitou”) i.e. for the hot springs
  • Spur line Qizang – Xiaobitan (near the southern end of the green line, a few stops before Xindian)

In particular, you see different neighbourhoods, and various jungly hills right on the edge of town.
I did in fact pass through every single station on the network (though I may have forgotten some minor above ground portion).

Taipei: Food – some meals I enjoyed

Here are some of the meals I enjoyed in Taipei.

Regarding the traditional breakfast, it was at Fu Hong Dou Jiang, a busy morning-only place on the 2nd floor across from Shandou Temple (blue metro line), a place I found online from other traveller’s posts
The couple in line behind me, who spoke English well, helped me order as there was no English and nothing to really point at.
The salted soy milk (shen dou jiang) was better than expected – the couple warned me against it, thinking it would be too unusual for westerners.
The bread (shao bing) is thick and made in a tandoori-like oven. I had folded into the middle of mine, though you can also have deep fried bread put in there.

Tip: Language difficulties pt 2

One thing I like to do is write down key phrases (and numbers) on a piece of paper that I can look at and study quickly without trying to flip through the phrasebook.

I also write down my own pronunciation guide for the word(s), especially here since the pinyin is a little confusing at first (see the related post).

It might go without saying, but if your handwriting looks like chicken scratch the way mine does, you really need to take effort to write cleanly. While I can figure out an English word that I scribbled, the pinyin and/or translation needs to be readable character by character or it’s not really useful anymore.

For example, excuse me is jieguang (with some accents not shown) and my pronunciation tip is jegwung. or is it jegiung? or does that say jegriung? hard to tell (for the record, it’s the first one, where wung rhymes with swung).

Travel technology

This was my first trip with a smart phone (Android). There were 4 (free) apps I used a lot:

  1. Adobe PDF reader for my downloaded Lonely Planet guidebook chapters. They were difficult to read on a small smart phone screen, but handy while out and about to double check something. Although the zoom function was weak – even with my good eyesight, the text wasn’t very big and the light blue markers/text for maps were darn near unreadable.
    Even reading the pdfs on my laptop was less comfortable than a physical book, but it beat carrying around a big guidebook (and if you’ve ever carried, say, the entire India guidebook, you know what I mean).
    Note: pdf reader was free; the Lonely Planet chapters were not.
  2. ASTRO file manager. Nice app for navigating my SD card, e.g. to find the pdfs (and put a shortcut on my home screen).
  3. WorldExplorer map program. In particular, I was able to cache portions of the Taipei map from google maps easily, to varying degrees of zoom, for use while walking around town. With a strong zoom, I could even see the building outlines just like on google maps website.
  4. Taipei Metro map program. Not indispensable, but it was nice to peek at the subway map from my seat, instead of having to get up and look at the map next to the train door. It shows both Chinese and pinyin names for each station.
    Note that the Taipei metro lines and stations do appear on google maps.
    Also note that they were in the process of renaming Danshui to Tamsui (which is notable because it’s the northern end station of the red line) to be a more accurate reflection of the name.

So what about wi-ifi you ask? Taipei is quite wired. Both my hostel’s and one cafe around the corner had wi-fi with 3-6 Mbps down and at least 500 Kbps up. So skype worked well for calls back home.

If you have a local Taiwan mobile phone, you can register to use the free wi-fi around the city (I noticed it in a few metro stations).

If I had been there longer, I probably would have bought a prepaid SIM card for my unlocked quad-band GSM phone. As it was, I didn’t have any real need to call anywhere.