Justin Gilmore

On Wednesday, I went to Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world. It started raining today so it was kind of a messy outing. Here’s a shot from the bottom:

The building was designed to resemble bamboo, which is symbolic of prosperity in Chinese culture. There’s 8 sections because the word for 8 sounds like the word for “rich.” (And, for example, the 2008 olympics in Beijing are starting Aug. 8 at 8:08 pm.)

And here’s what I saw when I got to the top:

Yuck, I know. Actually the fog kinda came and went, so i did actually get to see some stuff, but not more than a mile or two.

Taipei is a pretty boring skyline, anyway…just this really tall buidling surrounded by measly 20-story ones, quite unlike Hong Kong.

Bad photo, but this is a mass damper that hangs at about the 91st floor of the building. It’s enormous. It helps minimize the amount of swaying the building does from the wind.

And, mom, you wanted me to look for Louis Vuitton…found it. I don’t think these are in your price range though.

Some miscellaneous items…

–Somehow I managed to hurt my achilles tendon pretty good, so if being white wasn’t enough to make me stand out, surely limping across Taipei has helped.

–Don’t worry, even though it’s raining, the mopeds are in full force. They all wear these funny looking rain suits…I’ll get a photo.

–Walking around the other night, I hear a lively, mechanical tune start playing. Must be the ice cream man, I thought. No…turns out that trash trucks play a song. It was pretty funny.

–Here’s a photo:

Now, notice a couple things. The tallest building in the world has a freakin SONY ad on the side of it. Next, see the signs have no english. Neither do 90% of the other places and 80% of the menus. It’s been interesting. And, most importantly, see the little walk guy? He is animated and walks when you walk, and when the little counter above him gets closer to zero, he starts running. It’s funny.

For today, I’m gonna relax a bit to help my foot get better. Might go see a Chinese movie. Then meeting up with Chad tonight, I believe.

Hope everyone is doing well back in Omaha!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.