Stuff that didn't fit anywhere else

We were in Taiwan for the presidential election.  In Taiwan there is apparently no such thing as a postal vote or an absentee vote, and you have to return to your registered domicile to vote.  On the eve of the election there was an incredible line of coaches at the bus terminal, either bringing people back from the south to vote in Taipei, or taking them back down south to vote.  It feels very biblical - I wonder if there was room at the inn when everyone got there.

The Taipei Holiday jade market - an Aladdin's Cave of jade, jewellery, rocks and minerals...  Among the stallholders there was one who basically had piles of rocks from riverbeds just heaped on the benchtop - graded into different qualities at different prices.  He explained that it was rough Hetian jade (和田玉) and chalcedony from Hetian in Xinjiang, and that he'd bought it from Uighurs in Shanghai who had almost certainly illegally harvested it back home in Xinjiang.  It was fascinating to learn the word for chalcedony in Chinese -  玉髓 or "jade marrow".  The jade market is located in a carpark under an overhead expressway, and adjoins first the flower market, and then the art market.  I'd forgotten the way in which art is a common occupation for the deaf, so it was a delight to discover all over again the significant Deafness of the art market - to find ourselves in an environment where sign-language conversations were being held everywhere across the length and width of the market.

The West Gate Red Building - an octagonal Japanese-era building that was the site of the main markets for the Japanese colonial officials and their families.  It's located on the edge of Ximending (西門町), which is a commercial district near the site of the old west gate in the Taipei city walls.

A pallet of motor scooters at Carrefour in Xindian.  From an Australian perspective it seemed odd to see a pallet of motorbikes in what is effectively a supermarket.

A statue of the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin,  in the Da An Forest Park.  What is special about this (for me) is that the statue used to be next to International House, the grubby hostel where I stayed when I first arrived in Taiwan.  International House was demolished to make way for the park, as were the military barracks behind it, and the shanty-town alongside it - but they kept the statue of  Guanyin.  When I first arrived in Taiwan I spent a lot of time sitting out with Guanyin writing letters.  My memories of International House are not exactly fond - it was a bit of a dump.  The common showers were never cleaned, and the walls and floor were coated in slime that was literally centimetres thick.

This is a delightful Chinese-style pagoda at an intersection in Shilin - perhaps for traffic police?  If you look closely, you will see that it is actually a pill box, built as a precaution against invasion or military coup - see the machine gun slits in the concrete base.  The intersection is a major cross-roads near the former residence of Chiang Kai-shek.  There is a remarkable juxtaposition of elegant aesthetics and the brutal facts of a military dictatorship on an island at war.  The pillbox is now abandoned.

We stumbled across a Lego speciality store - a pokey little shop up a flight of stairs, sharing premises with a couple of budget clothing stores.  As you can imagine, there were members of our tour who were rather excited at the prospect of a Lego speciality store.  As well as the normal kits, they had walls full of individual spare pieces, and a display case full of individual Lego people that you could buy separately.  The day we found the shop was the day before Chinese New Year's Eve, and it was funny to see a little boy on the mobile phone to his father, negotiating for permission to buy a kit.  The boy was tallying-up how much money he had, and how much he expected to make in red packet money for New Year from his various relatives - basically looking for permission to pre-spend his New Year loot.  I didn't hear how the conversation ended. 

The shop attendant was a young woman wearing a top with a single English word printed on it - "estrus".  Maybe she thought it was a cool American brand.  While I doubt he understood the word on the top, there was a big nerdy guy in the shop, probably in his early twenties, who appeared to be chatting-up the shop assistant.  He was telling her he'd just got a new job where he was going to be paid in Renminbi and US dollars, and asking her whether the shop (yes, the Lego shop)  accepted Renminbi and US dollars.  I figure that if he's being paid in Renminbi and US dollars then a more pressing problem is figuring out how to convert them to local currency so that he will be able to eat - securing his Lego supply should have been a second-order priority.  I suspect he was just trying to big-note himself with the shop assistant - you can perhaps understand that if you are a confused twenty-something Lego-nerd the idea of finding a woman who not only works in a Lego-shop (maybe she gets discounts?) but possibly even shares your passion for Lego, would look like a match made in heaven.