Taipei 101

This is currently the tallest building in the world, and they have an observation deck on the 91^st floor. You have to pay NT350 to go up in the elevator to the indoor observation floor, then another NT100 to actually climb two flights of stairs to the outdoor deck. We did both. There was a bit of haze in Taipei today, so the views weren’t that great, but still pretty good.

We had a crazy taxi driver on the way, who, once he figured out we were Americans, wanted to talk about the state of world politics. I thought this was going to go one way, and we would have to apologize for our ass-clown of a president, but it went in a completely other direction, when he turned out to be Christian, and started quoting chapter and verse from the book of Revelation. Taiwan traffic is pretty cutthroat, and your first few times in a cab kind of take your breath away with what seem like close brushes with death. Then they guy taking you close to death starts spouting prophecy. Evelyn tried to engage him a little bit, and argue that maybe the Buddhists and the Dalai Lama don’t actually worship the devil, and I just stared out the window, mostly, thinking how this would make a funny story.

The elevator is amazing – it takes 37 seconds to go from the 5^th floor, where you get on, to the 89^th floor. Your ears pop on the way, and they have a display showing you how fast and far you’ve moved. It tops out at over 1km/min. By the time you realize what you’re looking at, the ride is over, and the attendant is ushering you off the elevator.

You also get to see one of the stabilizing weights they have in the building, which shifts position to offset the effect of wind on such a tall structure. This supposedly reduces movement of the building due to wind by 40 percent. There are two other similar structures in the building, which you don’t get to see. This thing weighs something like 660 tons.

From the top, you can see how small Taipei actually is, and how it’s occupying essentially an entire plain between sets of surrounding mountains. These mountains are really more like hills, and in Seattle, I imagine they would be developed, but there are just trees here. No idea if they’re protected, or nobody’s interested, or what. We managed to pick out the park near Ev’s apartment. The only real vertigo inducing moments were looking at structures attached to the outside of the building through the windows. That, and looking up at the spire from the outdoor observation deck, which goes up another several hundred feet, I think.