That Bridge somewhere over near Jiangzicui. I went there again. And even bothered with finding it's name through Google Maps. HuaJiang Bridge it's called.

This Thursday it rained again, so I decided to go for it. School ends early on Thursdays for me, so I went and saw a film in the library! My school has this kind of MTV like place where you can go borrow a bunch of films and watch them there. For free, (but only if you're studying there, of course.) You can watch them by yourself, or you can have a room for watching them in groups, should you have good classmates that aren't busy running to work part time as soon as they're off from school. So I watched The Happening.

After getting disappointed over yet another American film, I go home and pick up my umbrella and DSLR Camera. When I go home I usually take bus from Xinpu MRT station for a few minutes. I then find a free bus back to Xinpu station almost right after walking out the door, and decide to walk all the way to HuaJian Bridge from there.

At the time I arrived there, the weather had cleared a bit so it was quite light, also because I went there so much earlier in the day. I decided to take some photos, then read in my Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Great book, great writer. Under a bridge like that is almost the perfect place for reading such books! It's like climbing into the bottom of a dried up well for me, going to that bridge during rainy days.

If any of you guys have read Haruki Murakami, please feel free to share your thoughts. Or if you have had something with bridges or other special places that normal people would just pass by. I'm now going to show you some of my creations from that day. I used Adobe Lightroom to capture them out of RAW files and decided to put some creativity into some of them.
Enjoy.

This was taken later on the day, a few minutes before I went to have dinner I believe, so it was rather dark, especially since the rain had increased. Exposure time is 8 seconds, no flash. Have been working for a good time in Lightroom to make the bridge itself more visible and reduce the high exposure from light in the background. Look closely and you will see the roof of Taipei's second tallest building (Shin Kong Life Tower) far away on the left side of the bridge.

The other side.
You'll also find Taipei 101 in the distance, second tallest building in the world. Damn you Dubai.

The bridge earlier on the day looked like this seen from below. Mind you it was raining all day.

Standing atop the bridge, this is what I see: Taipei City seen from afar on a rainy day.

It was a little cooler this Thursday compared to Tuesday when I went here first. It was not that bad though. There were this guy running around (exercising) in the area below the bridge with no shirt on for a while, so it wasn't that cold. I sat pretty still though, reading my book.

Finally I decided to part with the bridge. I was starving and believed I had to hurry a little if I wanted to go to Taipei and eat. I got to Taipei Main Station faster than I had expected, though. So I was able to stay around for a while after, drinking expensive coffee and buying really, really sweet candy. Might as well have been half as sweet as usual Danish candy, which meant that the classmates with whom I shared the candy would leave most of the jellybeans and extinguish the not-so-dense candies.

Hope you liked the pictures. Here's a Slovenian guys take on the bridge during less rainy daytime: A day of a good walk from Jiangzicui to the Huajiang bridge. I also took few more pictures than these. Some more of them made it to boonbot.com and you can see all picture from this bridge here: HuaJian Bridge.

If you feel like using any of the pictures that I've taken and put on this page, feel free to do so. I assume you will be nice and attribute and put up links, should you decide to redistribute them in some way (on the web or any digital media as well as newspapers or books.) Please have a talk with me before you start using them for commercial purposes, though. If you want to use them at a website with heavy traffic, please mind that hotlinking could put a strain to my small webhotel solution.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Still alive and reporting from Banqiao, Taipei County, Taiwan. Been a bit gloomy lately, so I'm sorry for not having had the mood to write much.

Today it rained a lot. In the morning, it was a little cloudy and over the afternoon the city would start looking foggy when looking from the higher floors. Then it started raining a little, then more, then a little less. I decided to take a walk towards Taipei city by that time. Was told that it was impossible to walk all the way. I'd have to take a bus or MRT past the river as there isn't a lot of bridges for pedestrians. I don't know about that. Seems it's possible to cross the river walking next to the highway but I wouldn't do it for the fear that people might get angry. Besides, it rained.

I got off from school in Xinpu and got as far as Jangzicui pretty quick. Walking to the river from there on was a mystery to me with all those highways and roads and stuff over there. I did find a pretty nice place though, below one of the big highway bridges connecting Banqiao and Taipei. I did have to turn around a few times to get there, and apparently all the stuff they have over there is old gas stations and metal junk yards so not many people will bother to go there I believe. Especially on a rainy day. By the time I decided to rest for a while, (or rather, couldn't move further without walking into a river,) the rain was now so strong that I would rather stand under the highway. At that time it was raining like a heavy Danish rainsquall, but without all that wind and briefness that goes with those. I took some pictures with my puny point and shoot camera, depressed for not having brought the big gear. Next time it rains on a hot day, I'm going to bring it there I hope.

Amazing how few raindrops the camera manages to catch, isn't it? I can assure you it was raining cats and dogs, but these little point and shoots just doesn't do the magic like a DSLR. * Sad face *

While I was there I felt really strange. Been reading a lot lately. Especially Haruki Murakami and I felt like I could just aswell have been in one of his books. It was really jazzy there. Dark and not so crowded in a somewhat far off and quiet place. The sound from rain slipping down over the border of the bridge and cars driving around up there above was just awesome. And then it's like the end of a small world. Usually it gets really cold whenever the rain comes. (It is a bit cold now, actually.) But at that time, the air was still hot from the last few summerdays we've had, so it was pleasant. Also. Just standing below such a giant structure that such a bridge is is something I don't do everyday. I do skitter around below grand highways daily, they're everywhere, but it's quite some months since I stood below a bridge this size. You should try it. Go find a big bridge by a river and stand under it when it rains a lot. Haha. I hope you've read Haruki Murakami yourself. Otherwise you have probably no idea of where I'm trying to get with this writing. I hope you enjoyed it, though.

Can't promise too much with all these things going on, but I'll try and drag my DSLR over there sometime.

Am sorry about that. I go to school and talk a lot with people there, so there's not much time or new subjects for my blog at the moment. (Actually, there's loads of subjects waiting to be written about, but that'll require me to use some more time in front of the pc obviously. Besides, I want to get into programming browser games again. It seems like I have been contributing nothing to the tech game since I got here, and I've also got a number of other ideas for more simple games that need to get out. So far I have only sketches of code.

Anyway. Some weeks ago, methinks. ? - I went to take some pictures around Xinpu. That's still inside Banqiao, so I can walk there in a few minutes. My school is in that direction too, so now I actually frequent it. It's a lot more interesting than this little blue corner where I'm currently at.

Went to a Qing Dynasty style Chinese garden in the neighbourhood today. I can walk there in about 5 minutes, and am quite surprised I didn't go to see it yet. The place is a beauty and rather big for a family garden, yet is easily beaten by most other publicly accessible gardens, parks and memorial sites in Taiwan, I'd say. On a slightly related note, the weather has been increasingly hot since Tuesday, and so, today was a very nice and sunny day to spend in a beautiful garden such as 林家花園 (lín jiā huā yuán).

I'd like to make the written content of this post minimal this time, as I have neither time nor much new information to pass on. Perhaps it's nice to know, that the owners of this garden were a very rich and powerful family in Taiwan. For a nice amount of time the richest, actually. You'll still be able to find some of their descendants around in the business world of Taiwan. Also, the family name 林 (lín) is very widespread. At least four of my classmates at Kainan had that family name.