Why I love Taipei

A non-exhaustive list...

• the subway has beautiful trains and gorgeous stations: big, clean, well-lit and lots of lines of sight. Can't get lost there. Can't feel sad there.
• the city has lots of huge, wide avenues with plenty of space for traffic to flow, for scooters to park and for people to walk. Think of Toronto's University Avenue. In Taipei all major streets are like this. In comparison Toronto's main streets (be it King, Queen, or Yonge) do look like small-town streets. (It seems that the layout of those streets was mainly done during the fifty years of Japanese rule 1895 to 1945.)
  
• spreading from the major roads are medium streets (sized like most streets in Toronto) and from the medium streets spread lots of lanes and alleyways, which are really, really small (sometimes not even space for one car), but which are very, very lively: here's usually where the good food is cooked and sold, shops extend into the street and leave little space for people which is all taken up by those stopping by. This is the natural / organic version of a shopping mall and it's much better. (Yes, I am a fan of natural things!)
• Many of the big and medium streets have building build over the side walk, which thereby becomes roofed over. I think this is an excellent way of building a city: the street becomes wider, yet buildings are close together, and of course pedestrians are shielded from the rain. It's amazing that this works in so many streets, although the individual buildings are all different in architecture. Gaps between the buildings are often roofed over by very simple means which look very ad-hoc, but do their job. It's like a lot of diversity which agrees in the point that's most important: keep people's heads dry.
• the food, oh yes, the food would deserve a couple blog posts of its own. I only want to highlight one thing: the food places which I like most are very small, independently run, often found together in a food alley, or scattered through town. They are very small (maybe just a stand in the street), all the food as fresh made; the venues are very simple, much below western standards, for example, customers sit on little stools in the street, but the quality of the food is so much better: fresh ingredients, freshly cooked, with a large variety of herbs and spices. Just the kind of food that I could eat all week, no need to cook at home or go to a fancy restaurant. Key to this scheme is first that all food places are very small and offer only a bunch of related dishes --that's why they can make it all fresh on the spot and still be cheap-- and second that many of those small shops are found together in one street, which gives hungry people a huge choice of different things to eat.

Maybe I'll add more things later...