I Love My Neighborhood: Taipei’s Da’an District

Welcome to another edition of “I Love My Neighborhood”, where I ask expats from across the globe to share the joys of local life they’ve found in their corner of the world.

If you’re just joining in now, check out the other cities that have been covered so far here.

I’m so excited about today’s post as it comes from one of the funniest people I know, Jimmy the Kiwi. Jimmy and I first met in Singapore two years ago, when I hosted him thanks to a last-minute CouchSurfing request. Since then we’ve stayed in touch through epic email conversations (which is how I discovered Gmail only allows you 100 messages in a conversation before you have to start over with a new subject line).

Anyway, suffice it to say Jimmy is a good friend and I’d highly recommend reading his post, even if he is a little obsessed with Taipei’s rain and tiles.

Jimmy: Why I Love Da’an

Apartment hunting — i.e. running from shelter to shelter in thick rain and searching for nonexistent building numbers — was my first experience of Da’an. To be honest, I don’t remember if it was raining, but being Taipei it’s not a risky guess. Without dwelling on the rain thing, we should get it out of the way. Here’s average yearly rainfall:

Lima: 5mm (0.2in)
London: 736mm (29in)
Vancouver: 1107mm (43.6in)
Amazon Basin(!): 1500-2100mm (60-83 in)
Taipei: over 2400mm (95 in)

To put it another way, moving from Lima to Taipei would net you a 47900% increase in annual precipitation, give or take a few thousand percent. Yes, it’s wet. Very wet. And locals gleefully inform you of the acid rain. Repeatedly.

Moving on….

Da’an is a key part of Taipei — an area that encapsulates the wealthy, indie, business, student, local, chain-store, digital, traditional, natural, skyscraping breadth of Taiwanese society. Largely thanks to the breakneck speed of Taiwan’s economic development, you can find yourself on a yellow toy stool in the street, eating breakfast niu rou mian with a trash-collecting auntie, only to take in dinner at any number of upper-end restaurants literally metres away.

If you’re looking for something in Taipei, you can find it in Da’an.

My Rooftop

Having grown up around houses shaped like mountain ranges, the common rooftop access in Taiwan has been a revelation. Fourteen floors high gives a great vantage point of Taipei 101, the building formerly known as the tallest building in the world; sunsets over the river; and air traffic from Songshan Airport sliding down behind the city mountains. And despite the roof serving an entire building, I only ever share the space with one other guy, who silently plucks his eyebrows as I murder Coldplay songs with my hot-pink Hello Kitty guitar in the fading light. We have an understanding.

(As a side note, there’s supposedly a rule that only top floor apartments get access to the roof, unless an [illegal] dwelling is built on the roof itself to pull in more rental cash, at which time the whole building gets the goods. I now, for your pleasure, dub this phenomenon ‘hush access’.)

Public Transport

Da’an — and I thank the all-knowing Wikipedia for backing up my hunch on this — is one of the best-served districts in Taipei. In addition to the multiple MRT lines running through, there are even more under construction; and when I walk out my front door, at least fifteen bus routes roar past in a blur of toothpaste advertising and deadpan road rage. A collateral benefit of all this public transport is that because stops are announced in four languages, I now know how to say ‘Technology Building’ in Chinese, Taiwanese, Hakka and English. Ain’t no thang.

The Breakfast Place

There’s more than plenty to write about food in Taipei, and there are thousands of breakfast places that seem to make enough money to close five minutes either side of when I’m hungry, but there’s a 24-hour one in Da’an that a) serves simple but excellent Taiwanese staple foods, b) has a staff of super cool aunties who’ll teach you vulgar Chinese and c) takes exactly eight minutes to prep and serve shui jiao — with my saliva glands hitting the wall and blowing out their fuse around the 7-minute mark. A dreadful, slippery mess, but the concrete floor is easy to hose down.

Shida

The government recently cracked down on so-called illegal vendors in the Shida night market, so these days there’s slightly less ‘mad buzz’ and slightly more ‘space to move your arms while you walk’ in the alleyways. Despite the scaling down, it’s still a vibrant place to visit — Shida has three major universities in close proximity; a long but cosy park with places to eat, drink, play music and people-watch; and a nice mix of low-fi, upper-end and Western stalls and restaurants.

Da’an Park

Formerly land taken up by military officers and their families, Da’an Park is now the central eco-cog (did you like that one? Eco-cog, I mean. Made it up, no biggie) of Taipei. I live a few minutes’ walk from the park, and spend many nights having a quiet beer on the amphitheatre stage watching elderly locals snuggle/line dance/brandish swords/practice opera singing by fully bending over and prostrating themselves at the feet of their spouse (the latter being quite possibly the best Friday night ever).

Tile Pavements/Sidewalks/Footpaths

This one is less of a love, more of a love/hate, or hate/love, in that I hate the tiles with cold fury, and they love trying to kill me every time it rains (which, as we established earlier, is quite often). The concept of this post is ‘I Love My Neighbo(u)rhood’, but I can’t write about Da’an or Taipei without mentioning the tiles. So if you’re seeing this, the hateful content has escaped Edna’s editorial wrath. [Edna: Look, Jimmy sent SIX photos of tiles along with this section. I thought I’d let him say his piece.]

Anyways, someone in the Taipei City Planning Department decided that the ideal construction material for foot traffic, in one of the wettest cities in the world, is ceramic tile. Got somewhere to be? Late for work? Just like to walk confidently to a generic destination? Don’t worry, the tiles will send you forwards faster than you could ever travel on your feet. Sure, you’ll only go a few metres and then straight down on your neck, but meh, semantics. Seriously though, learn to walk at crippled old lady speed, or learn to break your fall with your nose.

Tiles aside, though, it’s pretty obvious I love Da’an. It runs the whole gamut of society, barely sleeps, gives you little corners of quiet urbanity to relax, keeps you on your toes, and gets you where you need to be. If you’re moving to Taipei, you couldn’t find a much better place.

About the author: Jimmy is a man who at least one human has described as the ‘handsome front end’ of his newly-launched project Minaal. That’d explain the endless flirtation from randy llamas the world over. When Jimmy isn’t editing tourism videos on top of a fridge in the Matsu Islands, he’s working off the chicken sweats contracted during supplier meetings in China (he is yet to convince them that not all Westerners devour an entire bucket of KFC breasts for every meal). With interests ranging from internet freedom to Arnie flicks, Jimmy’s overarching passion revolves around creating a sustainable location-independent lifestyle. At Minaal he blogs on the perpetual fight against the travel drag scourge.

Ladies: Jimmy enjoys sunsets, long walks along the beach, and eating insects.

All photos and captions courtesy of this guy. I’m not taking credit for his snark.