Sunset over Taipei

There is a very nice park on top of a hill nearby where we live. The hill is named 蟾蜍山 (chan2 chu2 shan1). It translates as "toad mountain". At sunset there are truly many toads hopping around, so the hill deserves its name. The hill hosts a nice park and unpaved footpaths through dense forest, so it is an ideal place to seek some relief from the noisy city. Also, we recently discovered that there are some truly nice views down on Taipei City. The following panorama shows a view of Taipei as seen from the park up on chan2 chu2 shan1. The view is dominated by the skyscraper 台北 101, or Taipei 101, towering even above the easterly adjacent mountains (to the right of Taipei 101). Being Austrians ourselves, we are of course particularly proud that it was Austrian Felix Baumgartner, who dared to base-jump off it! The mountains in the background belong to the Yangmingshan (陽明山, see our blog entry in March).

The following photo shows how the exuberant vegetation frames the city so it appears to shrink in size.


Sunset itself makes everything look peaceful and calm.


Once dusk has fully set in, the city gets an entirely different look.