Rainy Days in Taipei

After a couple of fantastic weeks at home in Alexandria I headed west to get east. I have been in Taiwan for six days now and I have to tell you I'm pleasantly surprised. I'm not sure what I was expecting but I'm really enjoying my time here. The people are interesting and awfully friendly, the food is damn good and what I have seen of Taipei city is rather impressive.

I'd say the only negative of my stay so far has been the weather. It has rained five and a half of the six days I have been here. I have seen the sun for maybe 20 minutes. While the rain hasn't really slowed me down it has given me reason to pause.

It rarely rains hard, usually not much more than a mist, and for my first few days I left the umbrella behind and marched down the street with nothing more than a waterproof jacket with no hood. I'm of the attitude that a little water on your face never hurt you, but apparently, I was mistaken.

As I found out, the rain here is acid rain, full of all kinds of undesirables from China's coal plants and industry. While Taiwan is hyper-environmentally conscious and clean,(I have never seen a country take recycling so seriously) there is little to be done about the pollution that rolls in from the mainland. No one here ventures out without a hood, hat or umbrella. Apparently, it's not uncommon for people's hair to fall out from overexposure to the rain. Needless to say, I don't go anywhere without my umbrella.

While I have yet to breath in the air in Beijing or stare down at one of China's nameless and massive industrial cities, this was the first time China's (our) environmental nightmare became real to me.

By chance, I noticed a review in Slate magazine of Jonathan Watts' When a Billion Chinese Jump. The book is a new and nuanced look at the eco-disaster brewing in the PRC. The review is gripping and the book seems fascinating.

"When Jonathan Watts was a child, he was warned: 'If everyone in China jumps at exactly the same time, it will shake the earth off its axis and kill us all.' Three decades later, he stood in the gray sickly smog of Beijing, wheezing and hacking uncontrollably after a short run, and thought: The Chinese jump has begun. He had traveled 100,000 miles crisscrossing China, from Tibet to the deserts of Inner Mongolia, and everywhere he went, he discovered that the Chinese state had embarked on a massive program of ecological destruction. It has turned whole rivers poisonous to the touch, rendered entire areas cancer-ridden, transformed a fertile area almost twice the size of Britain into desert—and perhaps even triggered the worst earthquake in living memory."

I'm off to find a copy.