Articles by Doug Nienhuis
I am a Canadian, and I am currently traveling through Asia with a touring bicycle. These are stories and pictures from my trip.
Saturday Morning Musings
Saturday December 3, 2011
It’s another Saturday morning over here in Taipei. It’s quite a different kind of day in that the sun is supposed to shine all day and the temperature has plummeted. I can sense Canadians rolling their eyes (one Canadian in particular), but it’s true. It’s quite cold here in Taiwan at the moment – outside and inside. I’ve got my heater plugged …
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Two
I know this link has been making the rounds. I’ve seen it on Facebook and on other blogs. I just thought I’d put it here so I can share in the awesomeness (and see what it’s like to put a link in a blog). It’s a video, by the way. Click on the picture or the link below to watch it on YouTube.
Marcel the Shell …
Botanical Gardens Taipei
[slickr-flickr tag=”botanical gardens blog” type=”galleria” size=”medium” sort=”date”] These pictures are of the Botanical Gardens behind the National History Museum in Taipei. I find it interesting how much it changes from season to season. I was there in the summer last, and the lily pads were so thick, you couldn’t see any water at all. It looked like a jungle or a green carpet that you …
Museums of Taipei
I did the rounds of the museums in Taipei on Saturday. I’m lucky in that the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is only a couple of blocks away. I can walk there in three or four minutes. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is also nearby. Finally, I went to the Tittot Glass Art Museum. It was my first visit to this museum.
I started off, as …
NPR’s Planet Money Podcast
Each week, I listen to a couple of dozen podcasts. My favorite by a good margin is NPR’s Planet Money. It’s about economics, but this is economics as you’ve never heard it before. This is not the economics of complex numbers, difficult equations, statistics, and ten economists in a room all saying different things till you don’t know what to believe. This is economics of …
Handel’s Oratorio “Jephtha” at Zhongshan Hall
I tend to do a lot of things on impulse these days, and my impulse last night was to attend a performance at Zhongshan Hall. The performance was of Jephtha, an oratorio by Handel, and it was one of the more extraordinary evenings I’ve had in a long time.
Zhongshan Hall is one of the grand performance venues in Taipei. It was built between 1932 and …
Seeing a Movie at the Breeze Center
Another thing I like is going to see a movie at the Breeze Center here in Taipei. The Breeze Center is a somewhat high-end shopping mall on Fuxing Road. There is really nothing in the mall itself that I would ever want to buy. Most malls in Taipei are like that. If you gave me ten thousand US dollars and sent me into one of …