I am interested in knowing about odd and interesting places in Taiwan. I live in Taipei, so knowing about weird things in the Taipei area is more relevant, but I am still very much open to finding out about freaky stuff in other parts of the island.
My own rather meager contribution: near a friend’s home in Songshan district, near Yongchun MRT, there is some social housing which is kind of weird. It consists of long buildings with a door at either end. The central corridor must be at least 100 meters long, and when you walk by it you can see into a weird Taipei poverty world, with rumpled old people sitting outside their doors next to piles of semi-junk. It’s a bit freaky, when you walk buy it at night in a slightly toasted state of mind.
In the mountain road that starts with Jinlong Rd in Neihu, at a certain point there’s a small colony of stray dogs in really terrible condition, with obvious tumors and skin falling off and all that. It seems like someone feeds them there every day.
In Longshan night market, there are small side-streets where pretty young women stand in front of apartment buildings and invite passers-by to come in and “drink tea”
There’s a bar near Zhongli where people openly sell drugs inside and teenage girls on E do volunteer stripshows. Never been to that one, but my social worker friend says he has.
I’d be extremely happy if people could totally outdo me on weird place stories! Bring it on!
The UFO houses that cfimages has in his avatar are pretty surreal. For years it was open and then they got a security guard who tries to stop people from going in. Be careful if you go at night.
Indeed they did. Big bare patch of ground there now, prime real estate too. Gonna open me a piggery and a duck farm, methinks, and a KTV, of course, fronting the road, because who wants to look at the horrid ocean?
weirder places would have to include CKS Memorial Hall: Who in their right mind wants to pay homage to a cruel dictator responsible for the deaths of thousands and the imprisonment and persecution of thousands more Taiwanese?
That’s my old 'hood. I used to live in the complex of tall buildings. Brilliant because my view was assured because the poor people’s houses couldn’t be torn down and redeveloped. I loved living round there; the market is full of really friendly people and lots of the older guys especially wanted to chat.
[quote=“Buttercup”][quote=“BigJohn”]
My own rather meager contribution: near a friend’s home in Songshan district, near Yongchun MRT, there is some social housing which is kind of weird. It consists of long buildings with a door at either end. The central corridor must be at least 100 meters long, and when you walk by it you can see into a weird Taipei poverty world, with rumpled old people sitting outside their doors next to piles of semi-junk. It’s a bit freaky, when you walk buy it at night in a slightly toasted state of mind.
[/quote]
That’s my old 'hood. I used to live in the complex of tall buildings. Brilliant because my view was assured because the poor people’s houses couldn’t be torn down and redeveloped. I loved living round there; the market is full of really friendly people
and lots of the older guys especially wanted to chat
.[/quote] :eh:
I’ve only seen the Chunan grain temple / grain god from a distance while riding a train, but the first time I saw it, it got my attention. Maybe other people won’t find it very interesting, but anyway, here are a couple of pics of it:
Last night I was riding my bike in the hills of Maokong and as I came around the only dark patch of road I spotted what looked like a mountain keelback snake about a meter from the edge. Sure enough it was but it had just been run over and his severed body was still twitching. I shone my bike light on his head and it reared up in a last gasp of bloody life, scaring the beezeesus out of me. The tail however, long an tapered, continued to slither for some time.
There is a pedestrian overpass about 500m ENE of Taipei Main Station, upon which a mentally disabled man/monk places his head everyday, moaning. Just below his lips the cement has developed a very, very subtly unique lustre.
He knocks off about five, if your a man with a camera and a connoisseur of surfaces…
