Taiwan Adventures, III

Friday.

Yesterday, I travelled along the North line of the MRT; today was discovering the East/West line. I decided to go see Longshan temple, because it was one of "the things" to do in Taipei, and then trace my way eastward to the city's centre, where Taipei 101 was located—I couldn't really visit this city and not go at least to the base of the world's tallest office building!

Longshan temple has a 350ish year old history, whose story begins when a person hung an amulet on a tree & it apparently glowed brightly because of the god's power in that location. Since then, they've built a temple & they've increased the godly patronage from just that first single one to now dozens of worshipped statues and several incense altars. Every time I visit a temple or religious location where people pray to, sacrifice and in other ways worship idols, my heart cries within me. I cannot wrap my mind around the notion that a rock or that a piece of wood or even that a lump of baked mud can contain any power in which to help people. Granted, I can concede that these images are not the things worshipped, but the ideas behind these images and the spiritual forces involved there could in fact be very real. The depressing part is that you can see that the worshippers of these spirits are slaves: they give up their freedom, their resources, their very lives to kneel down & pay tribute to these things in the hope that their actions might bring about a positive impact on their lives—and if they become slack in their devotion, bad things will happen.

A Rabbit Trail (or snake tail)

This reminds me somewhat of the recently installed sculpture in Bangkok's international airport: one that depicts a classic scene from the creation account in their religion—a blend between Buddhism and Hinduism. The scene shows a struggle between the serpent lord and demons against men and angels in the middle of the sea of milk. The serpent lord has himself wrapped around the mountain of the world, and the demons are tugging on his body in one direction, whereas the men and angels are pulling on the serpent's tail in the opposite direction. The resultant struggle causes turmoil in the sea of milk, which creates, somehow, the elixir of immortality. This elixir is held in the hand of Vishnu, who is dancing atop the mountain between the serpent lord & his demons, and the men & angels.

Why I 'm reminded of this is because in Thailand, they not only worship images of Buddha, but they also pay tribute to local animistic spirits, and a set of the Hindu gods—including this serpent god, the king of the naga, whose minions are used as wards or protectors of the temples & holy places. Take that as you will, after some consideration. It gives me the chills every once in a while.

Back to Taipei

Longshan was pretty interesting, albeit sad. There are some beautiful pieces of artwork created for the temple, like the intricately decorated columns which have been carved to resemble twisted vines on which birds perch. A couple golden altars of incense mark certain areas within the holy place, and in the outer courtyard, a man-made waterfall rushes down over rocks into a coy pool. Pretty nice.

As I arrived there, I was met by an older gentleman without many teeth in his mouth who had been sitting/lying underneath a pavilion to stay out of the rain. When he saw me, he ran up and shook my hand, expressing several things in Mandarin of which nothing made sense to me (surprise, surprise). Eventually, I had to tear myself away from him to get to the temple, so when I returned to the MRT station, I purposefully avoided the pavilions, just in case another incident of the same likes would happen.

Several stops down the MRT line, I jumped off to wander around the city centre. It was getting close to lunch-time (and when I saw close, I really mean 2 hours after), so I decided to take the advice of my Lonely Planet & check out Taipei 101's basement food court. Fantastic! It reminded me of North American food courts, but on a much higher scale / class. There were sushi bars, rib BBQs, subways, pizza joints, Italian cafés and a slough of indigenous eateries. Opting for something I couldn't get elsewhere, I grabbed a bowl of Shanghai beef noodle soup and supped till I was stuffed.

The Mall on the first 5 floors of Taipei 101 is nothing really like anything I've seen in North America. The only thing that comes close is Siam Paragon at the heart of Bangkok: piles of boutique shops where only the crème de la crème could ever afford to drop some cash into the offers. For those of you familiar with Paragon, 101's mall makes the Thai equivalent look like a grubby strip mall on the bad side of the tracks.

On the fifth flood of this mall is a cavernous hall that possibly could be used for expositions, but instead "housed" a few posh dessert shops and a top-tier tailor. Up the escalator from here was the entrance to the observation decks. I decided that I might as well take a peek of Taipei from 351 metres up in the air while I was here, so I dropped down 350 Taiwanese dollars ($12), jumped in the waiting line & then rocketed up 83 floors in like 20 seconds on the world's fastest elevator system (top speed is 61 km/h). The next two hours of my life were spent looking out from the tower through clouds and amidst the slight swaying of the floor, only to then proceed to walk by & see the building's 651 tonne passive sway damper and the walk through about 60 coral jewelry stores before being let down to the base of the behemoth building.
It's funny to me, knowing that the CN tower is much taller than Taipei 101, that all the signs in the observation deck proclaimed that this structure was the world's tallest—and then it struck me as even more humourous when they listed the top 10 tallest buildings in the world, and the CN Tower was conveniently ignored. Apparently, Canada's engineering marvel doesn't rise higher than the Empire State Building. Heck, the observation deck even cites the Space Needle, but it doesn't anywhere mention anything about the CN Tower. I wonder why... ; )

It continued to rain for the rest of the day, so I headed back to my hostel to get some research and planning done for tomorrow's adventure to Gold Ecological Park.