Week 3

I knew that finding people practicing Taiji at 1:00 in the morning is a difficult task. My friend and I went anyway.
We had spent the entire Saturday in a place called Ximen. Wu Laoshi, a teacher from the ICLP program, had taken us there to dinner. This is the "Japanese" part of Taipei. The streets are pedestrian friendly, clean and lid up by advertising. Everywhere, Japanese restaurants, Karaoke bars, and 7/11 convenient stores with colorfully dressed Asians buying Pocari Sweat drinks.
After a long meal and conversation in Chinese, Wu Laoshi went home, leaving my friend and I alone in this rather queer part of town. Since we had nothing better to do, we hit a cinema close by. By the time we finished, it was almost 12:00, the last possible time to catch our train home. We frantically ran to the next subway station and luckily, made it. In the subway we realized that Chang Kai'shek Memorial Hall was one of the stops, which according to our teacher, has an interesting Chinese park. This park was only a couple of stops away from the apartment, so we decided to stop there to visit the park and possibly interview some people, in the hope to find adequate answers for our homework for Monday.
We came out of the subway station, and encountered a grand plaza with large buildings with typical Asian roofs, two on the left, and one tower in the middle. This place reminded me of the imperial palace in Kyoto, but definitely with its own touch of Chinese culture. Astounded by the ambience, we aimlessly walked through the area in the hope to find a park. Finally, we reached it, and surprisingly at this hour, there were people to, unfortunately, no one practicing Taiji. We asked five different people if we could find a place to do Taiji, but everyone with responded with the same confusion: “no, only at 5:00 in the morning.” We were contemplating on whether to stay in the park and wait for the sunrise and join the Taiwanese in their daily Taiji, but it was getting too late, so we took a cab home.