The Taipei City Government Tour: a robot is haunting Taipei

There's nothing like setting off on an unusual mission, in an unfamiliar city, in a country you've never been to before. It was with this spirit of embracing the unknown that I set out to make an exploration of Taipei using Drift, an app designed to assist you in getting lost.

The day had other plans for me. I had to enter some information and was then asked to register. Being in a place where I don't have a data-plan, indeed where my regular phone wasn't working at all, this was not going to happen. Taipei City Centre does have a free Wifi service but you need a Taiwanese phone to access it or else a number from one of the ten listed countries, a list that includes neither the UK nor China.

Dis-connected but still with a desire to explore, I set off from the bamboo clad Museum of Contemporary Art. Rather than deciding in advance where to go, what to look for or how to  go about doing this, I just started walking so that I'd gain some momentum. 

I went to cross the road and, as I was waiting for the light to change, remembered what I had read about many traffic lights having no causal relationship between the pushing of the button and the traffic stopping. You press the button and, because the lights operate on a fixed cycle, it changes nothing except it now displays a red light telling you to wait. I find this use of placebo buttons annoying as it betrays a condescending attitude to the the pedestrian and only encourages in me the very thing they try to suppress: the very natural instinct to jaywalk. I crossed the road.

With no app to guide me, I tried a time-tested strategy instead: I pulled out a coin and decided to let it decide which way I should walk at each junction. A head and I'd turn right and a tail would spin me to the left. Setting off in this way I realised I had downloaded the Taipei City Government's Audio Tour and so I began listening to it as I slowly navigated my way around the city centre.  

The recordings are, quite frankly, unlistenable. The woman narrating them sounds one step away from a computer-generated voice and to make matters worse, infuriatingly cheerful plastic music accompanies her robot-like voice. It's the sort of well-made trash you might expect to come across on a hard-sell corporate video but voluntarily listening to it is not something I'd recommend to anyone. For the purposes of the tour, however, I subjected myself to it, and, an hour later when she/it finally stopped, I was none the wiser. My head beaten into submission, I came to Ulysses Hotel which set me off thinking I really should reread the novel as it can be understood as the record of a day walking around Dublin.

The coins had a habit of creating their own story. I came to this enigmatic white building bearing the sign 'WAITING ROOM'. The place gave nothing much away: it was not obviously a gallery and, whatever it was, it was shut so I had to stand outside and dutifully wait during which time nothing very much happened. The waiting, the blank time, was the point of it, I guess. To compound this, I set off and the coins took me in a circle right back to the WAITING ROOM, however this time round, a woman had emerged from a building opposite and was burning ceremonial paper money, the type that gets burned in the belief that it can help deceased family members in their afterlife. I then imagined some grandpa in the next life gratefully receiving this money and using it to buy things.

Who knows, if the next world is a mirror image of this one then this grandpa may have used the money to buy a train ticket in the Taipei Central Train Station, where a large number of people were sat directly on the floor WAITING.

I zig-zagged a path through the city and stumbled across an Indonesian fashion show on a large open-air stage at the back of the Taiwan National Museum that seemed mostly of interest to a small audience of Indonesians. I'm not entirely convinced that this sort of display of traditional costumes exactly works as a fashion show, this looked to me more a cultural identity gig. That said, for all I know this might be a radical departure for Indonesian fashion. A slim man, also in traditional costume, stood at the side of the stage and intoned into a microphone over a gamelan soundtrack. He introduced each of the models and the only thing I could make out was that each introduction finished with a flourish and the word, "Indonesia!"

Continuing through the city centre, I came across a Falun Gong manifestation. The last time I saw them was when taking a tour around Bath City Centre where they play the part of the oppressed. Here it was a different story. The most striking thing about it was being in the presence of so many people in a deep consuming silence. I heard birds for the first and last time this day.

It was inevitable that I should pay a visit to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, it is a part of the audio tour after all. Walking around the imposing architecture, the robot voice came back to remind me who the bronze figure was and somehow made his achievements sound less than what they really were. That didn't stop the question of national identity from being very present however, this was a constant theme I kept encountering during my tour and stay in Taipei as a whole. I found it curious how much people wanted to stress how Taiwan was completely unlike mainland China, and while yes it was clearly more clean, wealthy and orderly, it also seemed to me more similar than different. On the other hand, looking at this young boy gazing up at the motionless guard in the presence of the elder statesman I thought about what my Taiwanese hosts had told me earlier, namely that they had grown up all their lives in Taiwan and felt no connection at all to the mainland which they were more than a little wary of. How this unfinished story of nationhood will unfold in this boy's lifetime is hard to predict and this sense of the uncertainty seemed to me a feature of this city that took solace by embracing its present.

The day wore on and I knew I would be neglecting my tourist duties if I did not follow conventional wisdom and head to a night market. It was almost precisely what I imagined it would be: an oversized, noisy, leisure shopping hub teeming with neon food stalls and fashion accessories. In a sense then, it did not disappoint. 

Returning back to my temporary accommodation I took the metro and as I was constructing my narrative about the city, namely that it aspires to be bland but actually manages to be quite interesting, I noticed this 'only in Taipei' advert on the Metro: anti-spy camera detection in restrooms. Seeing as I have never seen this sort of advert anywhere else in the world it made me wonder if Taipei had a particular problem with perverts placing concealed cameras in toilets and then uploading their videos of ladies on the job onto the internet. I guess that is a question I will probably never find the answer to but, rest assured, at least if you use the Taipei Metro restrooms you will, probably, be safe from electronic eyes.

Tours Coming Up: a tour crazy June

There are some tour events coming up that I'd like to mention. 

First of all, the London Tour is proving enduringly popular so it will return again on Thursday 11th June, starting at 7 PM from outside of Richmix London E1 6LA. 

Reservations: info ( a t ) billaitchison.co.uk Cost £8

The following day, June 12th, I'll be participating in Bees in a Tin in Birmingham, giving a talk on alternative tours. This will also include a discussion and it is part of a larger day featuring a number of invited speakers who cover topics across the arts, science and technology.

Then, on 19th and 20th June I will be participating in the Performing Place 3 Symposium at the University of Chichester giving a presentation on The Tour of All Tours.

To finish off a tour rich June I will be presenting a new tour of tours in Berlin for B-Tour Festival in Berlin 26th and 27th June. The festival is devoted to artist-made tours of alternative varieties and is a quite ideal context to see the project in. If you are anywhere nearby, make a point of coming and see some of the other tours too; this is where it is happening!

July is set to be busy too with the premiere of a new tour performance in Amsterdam and in August it will be Edinburgh's turn. Hope to see you in one of these places.

  

Marco Polo and The New Silk Road

I've been reading the Travels of Marco Polo, some of the writing that followed in its wake and a few films inspired by this journey too. It took Polo several years to reach China from Venice and so too could it take me several years to get through all of the accounts, commentaries, recreations, documentaries and so on, of this journey. That amount of time I don't have so this summary is necessarily incomplete. The book itself is both more and less interesting than expected. It was written long before the sort of travel writing that self-consciously places the writer inside the text, that can weave together reflections on culture and place with anecdotes and multiple narratives, that places itself amongst other traveller's accounts and deliberately strays into areas more the preserve of fiction. No, it belongs to an older tradition of writing on travel; the book reads as a merchant's account of a journey that might provide useful information to those who might wish to follow the same route. As such, a lot of the things that I look for in modern writing on travel, and take somewhat for granted, are absent.

The book is, however, multilayered and for quite other reasons. Firstly, it was not written by Polo himself but instead by Rustichello a writer from Pisa who was, for a while, his cell mate when they were held prisoner by the Genoese. As travelling to China was unheard of back then, Polo and his trip were greeted with scepticism and his account was apparently deemed fictional by many. In the 1982 Italian film adaptation of The Travels, David Warner, a favourite actor of mine, plays the part of Ructichello, portraying him as a long suffering author who'd much prefer his own stories were taken seriously and that he be released from jail. This film is an true epic, complete with cameos from John Gielgud and Burt Lancaster, a major part for Leonard Nimoy who just about shakes off Spock, and a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. Rustichello is very present in this version and so, necessarily, is the active role he played in compiling and editing the travels.

From the start, then, there was an editor at work on the text. In the intervening centuries from it's first publication to me downloading it for free onto my travel-friendly kindle, it has accumulated many more layers of commentaries. The first third of the book was devoted to prologues and the biographies of the translators and commentators and as such reflected an orientalism particular to the British empire. I read about English public schools, railway construction projects in India and parliamentary committees. At first this padding surrounding the text seemed absurd and mostly pointless but, once the journey East finally began, the story seemed disappointedly bare and I started dipping back into the commentaries and the commentaries on the commentaries. Slowly, I grew to appreciate them, even those that seemed like pure diversions. One pervading feature of them is that they attempt to verify Polo's account by putting modern names to places in the original text and to check whether his travel instructions are accurate or not. For the most part it seems to add up. Another aspect of them is picking holes in the previous commentaries, or praising them when warranted.

As much as it is necessary to study the original text, a much more enjoyable read is In Xanadu, William Dalrymple's account of following, for the most part, Polo's route. Published in 1989, it reads as a student adventure that gets out of control. He looks for traces of Polo and the Mongol Empire and offers some useful background history, but this does not deflect attention away from the tribulations and absurdities of the trail. Faithful to the journey to the point of madness is the documentary In the Footsteps of Marco Polo which tells the story of two friends from New York who, in the early 90's, decide to recreate the journey. With little support or experience they chance their luck, end up being held up in war-zone Afghanistan, fake visas to get over borders, travel undercover with Uighurs, get bogged down in Iranian administration and generally have a thoroughly challenging and life-changing experience. Many other accounts exist, Colin Thubron's looks excellent for example, and I feel it should be necessary to read about the journey from the other point of view: travellers from the Far East journeying West or, Ibn Battua's 14th Century travel's from Morocco through Asia. All in good time.

Reading and watching these various accounts of this intercontinental trip does not exactly make me want to rush off and retrace the route myself: a journey through Afghanistan looks plain crazy right now. What it does do however is draw my attention to a long line of places in Central Asia that sit between Europe and the Far East. I am no stranger to making the journey in a plane, looking down over the mountains below and wondering how people live there before taking another bite into my airline meal or flicking through Toy Story 23 or whatever else is on the film programme. Convenient as flying may be, it sometimes feels as if it is either too slow or too quick. Too slow for the obvious reason that being squeezed into a seat for over 10 hours is no pleasure; you exhaust all the time-killing diversions available such as, magazines, videos, alcohol, your neighbour, food, music, work and staring at clouds, and there's still 4 hours more to go. That is a small problem however, compared to the journey being too quick. Too many times I have been spat out into an airport, blurry but excited with the promise of a new beginning with my body and mind completely out of synch. It has sometimes taken me several weeks for the mind and spirit to catch up with one another. What's more, Central Asia is incredibly diverse and to simply treat a vast swathe of the planet as an obstacle to be flown over as swiftly as possible strikes me as profoundly incurious. For all the talk of a 'global village' it is clear to me that this is a way to talk of a network of highly connected global hubs like Shanghai, London and New York. While those living far away from these hubs may know much about the global centres and the brands and celebrities that seem to spring from them, those in the hubs know relatively little of the life beyond the media bubble. Last year, for example, I got to know a group of Tajik students and they were all avid followers of Britain's Got Talent. I am not saying that watching a talent show is the same thing as really understanding a place but I had to confess I knew next to nothing of their country and would even have had to rely on a bit of guesswork to locate it on a map.

There is a revived interest in the Silk Road right through the Chinese governmental initiative "The New Silk Road". This is designed to stimulate economic and cultural links and it incorporates both the overland and maritime silk road routes of old. Additionally, there is also a new railway freight connection to Europe and plans for a high-speed passenger service in the pipeline too. While these ambitious large-scale projects might feel like a separate concern; the silk road of camels, deserts and traveller's tales is a far cry from today's freight containers packed full of fridges, model contests and state sponsored dance troops enacting friendship in national costumes, it does still reflect a need to connect to the actual terrain. Whether it is revived as a metaphor or enacted on a more literal level, Marco Polo's travels through the Mongol Empire, which have come in the West to stand for the the first European contact with China, have a renewed significance. For my part I will be looking into ways to slow my travel down and transform it into an activity in itself rather than a means to an end. Badakhshan here I come! 

The Scooter Tour of Beijing's Hutongs: just passing through

This scooter tour, given by Beijing Sideways, takes in Beijing's traditional low-rise neighbourhoods, or hutongs, that mostly remain in the centre of the city. The day I took it we started at 10 in the morning, just about the perfect time to get out at a unhurried pace but to still have most of the day ahead of us. It was an average gray, polluted day that passes for normal in Beijing, the Winter chill was just starting to relent and going outside for pleasure seemed like an option, not just plain madness.

These electric scooters are a new piece of hardware to hit the streets and while they look just like simple scooters, they have an electric motor concealed under the board that gives them a surprising kick. Balanced on it you can reach a respectable 15 mph, which is about as fast as you'd want to be propelled on a metal plate through the low-level anarchy that is Beijing traffic. There is some danger riding these things, but the risk is low and I'm glad that this is China where health and safety doesn't trump all, closing down things that are basically fine. In any case, most of the time we snaked our way through the quieter hutongs where the greatest danger was not cars but the bengbengs, motorised three-wheel taxis. 

Hutong tours are a Beijing speciality and while I do see Chinese people taking them around Nanluoguxiang, an old neighbourhood that has been very consciously redeveloped as a tourist destination, this sort of more far-ranging tour of everyday life in Beijing's hutongs, seems to me to be something that would be more popular with foreigners. I can only guess that this is because in the hutongs you have a more palpable sense of historical Beijing and you can see far more how people live than you can in high-rise neighbourhoods where domestic life is largely hidden. The buildings are often in a poor state of repair and are nestled inside large courtyards. These courtyards are often crowed out with the semi-improvised structures mushrooming inside them and they can house as many as 10 to 20 families in total. Smart, renovated buildings do also exist in the hutongs too, so these are not uniformly poor areas, but I get a sense that for Chinese visitors they offer a vision of the China many have only recently extracted themselves from and which they are not so far removed from that they can view it with curiosity or nostalgia. Our tour then was not exactly slum tourism, as the neighbourhoods are more varied than that, but there was a big difference between our lives and those of the typical local residents we passed. Some looked on bemused at our motorised quartet, and one or two asked about the scooters, "How much were they? How long do they run for on one battery charge?"

The group consisted of an American woman who'd been living in China a while, a Chinese woman who was working for a tourism agency, our intrepid guide Cesar from Barcelona and I. It was a random but agreeable group brought together by tourism. As we were making our way around I did ask myself if we were the target group for this tour. I am not a big fan of everything being demographically targeted right down to the advertising that appears on web browsers based on previous search habits. I find a somewhat random mix of people and experiences healthy, but it did strike me that there would likely be a significant difference between first, what native Chinese and non-native Chinese visitors would look for, and second, what ex-pats and tourists might find interesting. I think I might have gotten more out of this tour if I had taken it when I first arrived in this city, which is a way of saying, I have already explored the hutongs on foot and on bike and taken guided and audio tours of them which explained much of what I heard. That said, I clearly still knew less than anyone else on the tour so there were things to get from it and, more simply, it was fun to ride a scooter!

We made a stop for a generously portioned cup of hot wine and found that we had stepped into the middle of last minute preparations for a singles party due to start shortly in the wine retailer's function room. Wine is something of a new and fashionable drink that people here are finally drinking, and not just giving each other as expensive presents, and this place seemed to be riding on this effervescent wave of Prosecco induced excitement. We finished up before the young, upwardly mobile crew arrived for speed dating to another Western import: Valentines Day.

Fortified, but still on the right side of tipsy to control a scooter, we hit the streets again. From time to time we'd stop and hear something about the neighbourhood. I had to compare how it was to be led by a Western guide to how it was to have a Chinese guide, such as the one I had when I was shown around Qianmen. On the plus side, communication with Cesar was very easy as his English was good and he had a good sense of the things that might strike visitors as interesting. On the other hand, his relationship to the city, its history and culture were very selective and mostly second-hand. When he talked about the people in the hutongs he talked about them as a sympathetic, but detached, observer. This is in contrast to Mark, the Chinese guide who showed me Qianmen, who talked about the people of the hutongs as one of them himself. The emphasis on this tour was not so much on going deeply into the life of the area, it was much more about taking a ride through it and enjoying the scenery.

The dumpling lunch stop at Mr Shi's was a good call. The proprietor, Mr Shi, who does bear a resemblance to his cartoon logo, was there to greet us. He too had his eye on the Western visitors: the menus were properly translated (i.e. not by computer) and a sign prominently informed customers in English that the food is made without MSG or industrial quantities of salt. What's more, the menu featured dumplings with cheese, something I'd expect to find more in Polish pierogis than in Chinese dumplings. We ate well, chatted and the meal felt like a reward for for the completely artificial task we had given ourselves of riding to Houhai and back. The tour was relatively long, running to well over 4 hours, and while that is not so long in itself, there was a lot of plain covering distance. This was an early version of this scooter tour and I expect there will be a bit of fine tuning of it over the Spring with more stories and stops added along the way, a more fluid rhythm and maybe a few tweaks to the route. That usually happens with tours once they settle into themselves. The essentials are already all there, however, and it works fine: it is a safe adventure on two wheels through the Chinese capital, a chance to see the city in good company, and to see, hear and taste a little of what makes old Beijing tick