Taiwan (14/21-Dec)

By Cedric, . Permalink Asia › Taiwan

As a friend of mine was on vacations in Taiwan, I decided to go there and visit this island outside mainland China.

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For information, the status of Taiwan is a little bit complicated. Tu summarize, after the 2nd World War, Chang Kai Shek and Mao Zedong were fighting for power over China... Mao was winning and Chang Kai Shek fled to Taiwan, which was part of China. Since then the situation is a standby... for China, Taiwan is a rebelling part of China, and for Taiwan, the president of Taiwan is the legitimate president of China... Still if things do not really change on a political point of view, in practice things are improving: Taiwan and China are doing business together, Taiwanese are allowed to go see their relatives in China, there are flights and boats between them... The consequence of all this is that Taiwan is China and people there are real Chinese, unlike Hong Kong and Macau. And when you are there you feel like in China, but stilll it's very different from there. It's actually quite hard to describe the differences but sometimes you feel like in China, with probably less foreigners than in Shanghai or big chinese towns, and sometimes it's so different.... could be China Town in NYC. There I did different things, like visiting for sure, but also I went to hot spring, karaoke (called KTV) and cinema... The main event being cinema. In the middle of the movie, there started to be big sounds and the ground was shaking a little bit. I thought that the metro was around there or something, but things started to get stronger and stronger, shaking more and more, this was an earthquake. People started to shout, to run... but where to go? I mean the cinema was on the 3rd floor of a building and it would be taking maybe 30mn to evacuate the building. So I stayed, wondering what to do... and things calmed down. Quite an experience to live this 6.8 earthquake!

Photos here