After some late night out in Taipei and a long nap I decided to simply do some random walk in the city … as it was free admission today I visited the Taipei International Flora Exposition and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum featuring the Taipei Biennial 2010. The latter one had some really nice exhibits from Asien as well as international artists and kept me busy for about three hours until the museum closed … some Taiwanese buffet and an early night will finish the day I guess.

After typhoon Megi had washed away parts of the highway going south yesterday, we changed plans and took the train to Hualien and rented a car to drive into the Taroko gorge. Cerntainly worth the efford … quite an amazing gorge with marble all over the place, a few temples along the way and lots of waterfalls …
After coming back to Taipei I finally got into my hotel room I have booked since Friday and which has a wooden bathtub … yeah right!

As typhoon Megi passes by I just read that yesterday on the east coast and in Taipei we had as much rain in one day as we typically have in Germany in one year … more than 700 mm!
Today it looks much better and we’ll try to get to some gorges further south.

After the last day of the conference I started a little road trip with Troels and a friend of his to visit the east coast of Taiwan. Due to Megi we had rain for most of the day. Still we managed to get some good views, had some nice (and expensive) tea in Taiwan’s most famous tea area Jioufen. We drove along the sea to watch some massive waves break at the shore, had some great fresh seafood for lunch and finally ended in Troels’ friend beach house after some time in some nearby hot springs.

After two and a half days of computing in physics, a nice reception on Monday and some visits to various markets and sights in town, we had a little trip to a nearby geopark in Yahliu, with some nice stone/rock formations by the sea.