The Story of Taipei

The statement may sound like some banal utterance headlining a paid tourism advert or the first sentence in the fiftieth edition of some travel guide; however, I mean it when I say that of the places I have visited around the world, there is no other place with a similar feeling. The city is a living concoction of seemingly contradictory qualities. All around Taipei, you can find international luxury brands, local mom and pop’s restaurants that have been in business for decades, chic coffee shops tucked away in two-meter wide alleyways, Japanese izakaya bars, pocket parks, timeless-looking temples in the shadow of glass high rises, and neon-lit night markets accompanied with wafts of fragrant street snacks. Row upon row of orderly, square city blocks are cut into fragments by a jigsaw of alleyways where even Google Maps cannot help you. And even these quiet neighborhood alleyways, reminiscent of the 1950s, are then juxtaposed by a hypermodern metro system — arguably one of the best in the world — that moves millions of people a day from one side of the city to another. Thus, Taipei is paradoxically a comforting, chaotic, convenient, confounding, and orderly place. <a href="https://blakestephenanderson.medium.com/taipei-a-history-and-memoir-ae6ead626965">Visit Now</a>