Taipei is the best place on earth/city walking-try it!

don’t you just love taipei? it’s more fun now than it’s ever been-101,warner, shi men ding changed a lot from 7 years ago, Eslite everywhere, yan min mountain close by, etc.
do you know i have WALKED from tien mu to Yung Ho? i have walked taipei staion to yung ho countless times. this city is my life.
even though there’s some stuff that’s drive you nuts(hey it’s taipei for cryin’ out loud)there’s no place i’d rather be.

ran, the man who loves city walking

Really? I think of all the places I’ve been, Taiwan in general has got to be the worst place to walk around. It’s noisy, polluted, cramped, dangerous, and nearly all of the buildings lack culture. Also, I’m pretty sure that a literal translation of “sidewalk” from chinese to english would present something along the lines of either a) a motorcycle parking lot, or b)a relocated bathroom floor.

Conversation sample one:

Person 1: Are there sidewalks in your neighborhood?
Person 2: Sidewalk? …OH! You mean a [motorcycle parking lot], yeah, there’s tons of those.

Sample 2,
Person 1: Man, these [relocated bathroom floors] sure are slippery when it rains
Person 2: Yeah, it must be dangerous to drive those scooters on one.

I agree with Ran, to a degree. Taipei can be a nice place to walk around and explore. Even Yonghe was great fun to wander around in when I lived there. It’s got to be said, it’s certainly not the best place I’ve been to, but it’s nice. There’s all sorts of cool little shops and buildings snuggled away in alleys that you’d never find on a bus, MRT, or scooter.

I love walking around cities; Taipei is great for this as it’s a very dense city, so there’s always something interesting just a few feet away. Tokyo and NYC are also a good walking cities, San Francisco not bad, LA definitely not. Sydney I felt so-so, but Melbourne’s pretty good for it. From pictures Paris and London look like really good walking cities, but I haven’t been there yet.

I also think Taipei’s a great place for walking around. I love it. Especially at night. (especially drunk when I go on 1 and a 1/2 hour wlaks home to save on the taxi fare).

I also love scootering around at night (and on sunny days).

Brian

my thing with walking happened by accident. i had 50NT in my pocket . it was either bus or dinner, so i chose dinner and walked home. been doing it ever since.
i’ve since discovered that with a little effort, no place in taipei is too far from home. tien mu to yung he took me only a little under 3 hours. i do taipei station to yung he in 30 minutes. if you want to avoid the crowd at TP station, take the MRT to tai da hospital. it’s actually less tiring and a lot nicer walk thru or around 228 especially in the fall.

ran the man

[quote=“Bu Lai En”]I also think Taipei’s a great place for walking around. I love it. Especially at night. (especially drunk when I go on 1 and a 1/2 hour wlaks home to save on the taxi fare).
[/quote]

Hey, I like to do that too but I’ve never walked all the way back to Mucha. I have on occassion though asked the taxi driver to drop me off a few km from home and then complete the rest of the way on foot walking alongside the river.

Some streets I like to walk:

Fuxing
Zhongshan North Road
Roosevelt
Zhongxiao
Dunhua
the Taipei 101 area (broad sidewalks, no scooters)

Definitely Dunhua. Lovely street that is, especially walking down the nice little park-like traffic islands down the middle of Dunhua South (never really been up North).

Nanjing East Road is my favorite. They still have trashcans.
Tianmu to Yonghe is quite a hike. I’ve never walked across the river on the north side. Walking across the bridge into Yonghe is not too bad though. I don’t like the one into Sanchong, it’s too long and with all the traffic, not too pleasant.
Sometimes I try to find trails up into the mountain. I found the best way is to walk along the road and then look for a trail going down. Sometimes they are dead ends and sometimes you may end up in someone’s back yard, but you never know what you’ll find.

I can’t imagine how you could mention Tokyo and Taipei in the same breath. There’s absolutely no comparison.

you know yeti was talking about tokyo vs taipei. i agree there’s no comparison. tokyo has it’s own thing going on. but walking taipei i feel like " man this is where i want to be". i even hoped when i die there would be a taipei in another diminsion or something with my postion in it determined by how well i handled this one. am i losing it again? sorry. time for my zoloft again.

There is a lot to see and action when you are walking but the air quality does not make it that pleasent. I like walking down the alleys and lanes more then the busy streets. But if you think this is the best walking city then I suggest you need to get off this island more often.

Yup. While Taipei’s a good city to walk around, there are far better walking cities. Venice comes to mind.

i have funky tastes. but i do feel that the architecture in TP is a little less than inspiring. i saw this gentleman on TV (taiwan say Hi the TV show) that Taipei made him feel like living. for an older person to say that is a great testimonial for taipei being a good city. it’s a Zen city. you want to live in the now to the fullest.

I totally agree with the “dangerous” bit. I am writing from a cybercafe across the road from the hospital, where I am at this ungodly hour because I fear I have blood poisoning after taking a bad fall last night. (look at my posting under “Is Taipei really this bad?”) I also looked at “Get well card for Iris”, who I don’t know but she says she fell and shattered her elbow, not looking where she’s going.

As for the rest, I’m LOVE walking, in the city or otherwise, and Taipei is GREAT for doing that at night, IF you expect the worse on the “sidewalk” at all times.

axiom, you should add ploughed-up building-rubble dump to your list of definitions for “sidewalk”.

Of all the places I’ve been to, for great walking you can’t beat London, Cape Town and Glasgow, in that order.

Hm, that was a rather unlucky coincidence of circumstances and not entirely due to the “dangerousness” of Taipei streets (though it might not have been quite as bad if the barricades preventing cars from going in the lane had been a little higher than 10cm and better visible).

All in all, I love walking around in Taipei. I used to walk almost everywhere before I got so busy at work that I have to spend the whole day in the office. Most of the places are pretty close together, too. And walking through one of the lanes around my place on a sunny sunday afternoon always makes me realize how much I love my life in Taipei, how much I enjoy living in a place where palm trees grow on the street, where every neighboorhood has loads of tiny parks with playing children, chatting women and old people with their bird cages, where you can have afternoon tea outside in November and where every 50m you can buy pearl milk tea :wink: I still walk home a lot, takes me about 40 minutes and across the great Da-An Park that is usually bustling with life, children at the playground, people doing sports or dancing, couples snuggling up on the benches, even late at night.

But I do admit that often enough I consider the uneven, blocked and often slippery boardwalks freaking dangerous, too. Still, I spent almost three years in Taipei without any accidents of any kind.

Another city that I loved to walk around was Shanghai, especially the smaller streets in the French quarter. My friend and I used to walk around there for hours after work, looking at the great old houses and picking those we’d love to live in (only if we had the money to make them nice and comfortable, of course). Our favorite sunday afternoon used to be spent taking a bus all across town and then walking from one of the old Chinese quarters through the French quarter through the streets lined with impressive old 19th century buildings to the Bund. The whole history of Shanghai in a nutshell…

Iris

Taipei really is beautiful. There’s nothinhg I like better than to walk arounf in the motrning with a bottle of absinthe taking in the sxcenery.

For someone who has driven for more than 10 years daily back home, I am amazed that I could enjoy walking in Taipei (only during fall) so much.

Each time I will walk for 1-2 hours and I don’t feel tired at all. Strange?

Pollution is probably the greatest issue but what the heck, the weather is great and the place is full of distractions during the walk. What I really like is almost everywhere I walk, I will pass a park. I never had an agenda or plan where I wanted to walk. I walk to explore so it makes the journey fun and exciting too. Before this thread, I thought I had an unusual hobby, walking on streets on Taipei. Now I am convinced it is not that crazy afterall… :bravo:

Once I was out till 1+am on my own…yeah…only once…and I decided to walk cum jog home as it was a windy & chill night. It was great, I took about 15-20 mins to do that…no signs of life on the road home, felt kinda unsafe…so running was good and had a great workout at the unearthly hour… :wink:

I like to just set out walking and then count how many people ask me if I want a massage.

I miss walking round Shanghai. I lived for a while in a lovely old earsplittingly noisy part of the French Concession and was often up at the scrake of dawn wandering about. This would be three hours or so after coming home plastered to go to bed.