11-11-11

Sizihwan:  I cannot say enough positive things about Taiwan’s Metro systems.  Both Taipei and Kaohsiung have MRTs, and they are the most easily navigated in the world.  Tokens are cheap; vending machines are intuitive; enough English is provided for easy navigation; subway line maps follow the international grammar pioneered for London’s Underground; map placards of surrounding neighborhoods are posted exactly where you need them; riding escalators and entering subway cars have rules that people follow; above ground MRT stations are easily found; design standards are very 21^st century.  Kaohsiung’s MRT system dates back only to 2008.  It appears as if they used the 2009 World Games, which they hosted, as the motivation to build a world-class subway system.  (The World Games are held quadrennially for select non-Olympic sports.)  I took the Kaohsiung’s Orange Line to its western terminus today, Sizihwan, which means Sizih Harbor.  Of course it was raining, but only lightly at first.  The harbor neighborhood is old but now reinvigorated by a new university on its edge (Sun Yat Sen University), by a tourist trade that gravitates to the waterfront, by a tunnel through a mountain that leads to a beach, and by a series of ferries that offer easy connections to other waterside places.   As in every neighborhood, I found the morning market on a series of side streets.  I also found a few temples, one in a store front looking very humble and one rising above the neighborhood looking very elite.  

High Speed Rail Back:  I found myself thinking about New Jersey on the HSR trip back ‘home.’  Then, my mind went to Kent in England.  Then, I paid homage to Johann Heinrich Von Thunen, a German proto-geographer who taught me what I was seeing even though he died in the mid-1800s.  He bequeathed humanity a set of bid-rent curves that give us some perspective on rural land use around cities.  On this trip, though, I never got out of Zone 1, Von Thunen’s inner ring where market gardening predominates.  By this time, you should see the connection to New Jersey, whose nickname is:   The Garden State.   From the earliest days of Colonial times, New Jersey found itself between the two big cities of the Atlantic seaboard:  Philadelphia and New York.  They are only about a hundred miles apart.  New Jersey’s farmers had a market at either end of their state, so they used their land to provide perishables for urban populations divorced from the soil.  Perishable fruits and vegetables (like the bitter melons in the picture) must be grown close to the market (think pre-refrigeration and pre-superhighway).  Now, transition to Taiwan.  At the northern end of the island is Taipei, with its metropolitan population of 7 million.  Near the southern end is Kaohsiung, with its 3 million.  These two cities are a little bit farther apart than NY and Philadelphia, but the same rules of economic geography hold true.  Von Thunen’s bid rent curves have turned the landscape in between each set of cities over to the production of vegetables and fruits.  Once we cleared the industrial landscapes of greater Kaohsiung, rectangular fields took over.  Irrigation ponds and canals tethered them together.  The variety of crops I saw was immense, but my ‘low altitude flight’ over the fields allowed me to identify only a few with distinctive signatures:  sugar cane, bananas, cabbage.  Nevertheless, I knew that all those vegetables and fruits I saw in the Sizihwan market earlier in the day had come from this agricultural hinterland.  Changing that landscape now, also reminiscent of New Jersey, is the urbanization that is going on as the two cities expand and drive the growth of smaller cities in between.  As for County Kent:  it’s the Garden of England, just south of London.  At 2 pm sharp (and I mean sharp!), we were back in Taipei.

Rain Culture:  It’s Friday evening; it’s raining; and it’s as busy as ever on the streets of Taipei.  Everyone’s umbrella is at hand.  As people open and close them, the city looks like a garden of morning glories (evening glories?) choreographed by mother nature.  Somebody ought to write an umbrella symphony.  Here is a video taken not far from the Central Railway Station.

An etiquette goes with the use of umbrellas here.  Never take wet ones into stores and restaurants.  Rather, you are expected to do one of two things:  (1) deposit your umbrella in the receptacle outside, or (2) take one of the free tubular plastic bags available at entranceways and use it as a tote.  Should you leave your umbrella by the door, don’t worry about theft.  This has to be one of the low-crime capitals of the world.