15 Months in Taiwan: Where I Live (Picture Post)

So having been in Taiwan for 15 months now, I wanted to describe the community where I live.

15 Months on the Same Island (No worries!)

As of this week I've been in Taiwan for 15 straight months, the longest I've been in Taiwan before and actually the longest I've been in this small of a geographical area for quite some time. Even not counting going to Chicago a couple times for training and other random trips, the last four years before Taiwan involved a lot of traveling between Alabama and Texas for seminary and then support raising, over 660 miles one way. (Randomly, that's a bit farther than from Paris to Vienna. The US is a big country..)

For comparison, Taiwan's main island is only 250 miles long in total. Taiwanese students often complain they feel that Taiwan is small and enjoy traveling off island when possible, and I can empathize. But I am less prone to feeling this kind of claustrophobia since a) I spent most of the rest of my life out in that world, and b) Taiwan is such a rich and varied place. Each area of Taiwan has a notably different feeling from other areas, and the abrupt transitions between busy crowded cities, peaceful farming areas, and rugged mountains help make it feel like a much larger place than it is.

Where I live:

While trips away are nice, typically I'm busy serving in this community. It's a former industrial area where most of the jobs went to China years ago, high-density and low-income. The population is divided into three major parts: local long-term residents, usually working class or lower middle class, sometimes struggling as the community declines; commuters, whose work and lives are mostly elsewhere and who live here because it's cheaper; and new arrivals, mostly higher-income and younger who work in the hi-tech businesses along a renovated corridor that follows a main road.

Factories in our community. The mountains in the background are across the river.

The large neighborhood at the core of our ministry area is pretty typical for Taiwan, though in the greater Taipei area it counts as a bit run down. Daoist shrines are clustered among the dense row apartments separated by narrow streets shared by pedestrians, dogs, bicycles, motor scooters, cars, trucks, motor-driven scrap carts, etc. Everything is old and dirty, but it's quite safe, and the front and backs of the row apartments are lined with narrow balconies often filled with potted plants that sometimes send flowers and foliage stretching out into the air above the alley ways. Lately during the frequent grey days of early spring, those flowers and the bright red Spring poetry banners (春聯) posted around the doorways of the buildings are the only bits of color amid the drabness.

It can be a little bleak at times...

See what I mean about the spring color?

But, on a blue sky day, it's not so bad...

Notably, outside our ministry area to the west the Dapinglin MRT (mass rapid transit, Taipei's metro system) station is only about seven minutes' walk away, and as you near the station things are notably different; it's a commercial area, with newer buildings, lots of restaurants, and generally feels more like what you'd expect in the greater Taipei area. The main road running up from Xindian proper and passing right by the station changes names to become the famous Roosevelt Road that is the main artery of SE Taipei City, continuing on all the way to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial. The MRT station is also poised to become a transfer station by the end of this year, making further development a certainty.

At the MRT station intersection

It's hard to say how much that will affect our own community (other than property values inevitably rising), since investment follows main roads and MRT lines, and it's "tucked away" from these more influential areas. The community is bordered on the north and east by the Jingmei River, and seems almost a victim of that geography. Visualize a squarish area with the left and bottom sides formed by two main roads, with the bottom road especially being renovated, with luxury apartments in one spot, and the upper and right portion of the square not square at all but defined by the s-curve of a big lazy loop of river, with things getting poorer and older the further up into that loop you push, until by about 2/3 of the way in it's nearly all factories, some still open. The exceptions are where the river loop is punctuated in two or three places by bridges, and things are nicer right where the bridge enters the community, perhaps reflecting the fact that across the river (which has an amazing walking/bike trail that runs along it all the way up to the Taipei Zoo) is Taipei City proper.

A local garbage truck.. no trash cans in Taiwan, you take your garbage straight to the truck at certain set times.

The Jingmei River, boundary between Taipei City proper and former Taipei Country, now New Taipei City.
The yellow railings on the left are the beginning of that walking/biking trail.

Along those two main roads things change to mixed residential-commercial, with the bottom and sometimes upper floors of the buildings occupied by numerous restaurants and businesses. To the south is the hi-tech corridor I mentioned earlier, which begins abruptly as you walk out of our community and are suddenly facing large new corporate buildings, notably HTC's well-designed new headquarters. Past that is a parking garage for Carrefour, a French "hypermart," which shares its huge building with a foodcourt, spacious gym, and rooftop driving range, but within a stone's throw of it there's a large lot with overgrown shacks and banana trees. (All this is at the bottom left corner of that square I mentioned earlier.) Across from that are some newish higher-end car dealerships and a Starbucks.

One of the entrances to our community. The archway sign is for the temple on this side of it.

Just a couple minutes' walk away, the upscale area. Not shown: Gigabyte's corporate HQ is here too.

Keep walking and you're back in another neighborhood quite similar to ours. Across one main road from our community (the "left side" of our square), the street is lined with multistory apartment buildings with shops down below, but the community back behind them feels even older than ours.

The "left side" road, past those rows of apartment buildings and getting to the expensive area up ahead.

A quieter street in the "hidden community" back behind the apartment-walled main streets

This street, quiet in this picture, is often lined with vendors. To the right is a "grey water" (waste water that's not sewage) ditch lined with houses that aren't much more than shacks. It smells sometimes.

Older communities in Taiwan can be like mazes, with roads not featured on google maps (which has done a very thorough job in Taiwan in general), and passages between buildings not even wide enough for a person on a bicycle. There's an old day market, usually deserted, which is the fastest shortcut between where I live and the main road with the 24 hour McDonalds. If anywhere in our community is haunted, it would be that deserted market in the lonely hours of the night...

Turning to the right leads out to the road, keeping to the left leads deeper into the market. Creepy at night.

To the left: The mysterious passageway. Behind those covered walls to the right is that drainage ditch.

I have said before that old Taiwanese communities are bigger on the inside than on the outside. What I mean by that is the actual area of the community might be less than half an acre, and it's flanked all around by modern multistory apartment buildings. Yet get back behind those, and you'll have these little passageways and alleys and "you can't get there from here" sections that remind you that you are indeed in Asia.

And That's It For Now..

So that's a little glimpse of my community. Scroll back up and you can see it's a diverse place. Lots of lifestyles, lots of income levels, lots of challenges for the work we're doing, and lots for me to continue adjusting to as I experience life over here.

Is there anything you're curious to know more about regarding life or ministry over here?
Most people comment on FB where I link to these, but feel free to do so here as well..