BiTan

BiTan, My Neighborhood

By luck I ended up living in one of the best places in the Taipei area. It is a popular senic area in Taipei County, just south of the capital. It is a little remote, but there is a subway station nearby. I live on the opposite side of the river. Where my house is is the end of the concrete. Behind my house is a graveyard and nothing but green hills with the occasional housing development. These are some pictures I took in the area. There are a few more pictures from BiTan in the religious ritual page.

	The BiTan bridge during Chinese New Year or one of the other fireworks shooting festivals.
The Dragon Boat Festival boat races. Every year they race under the bridge.
	They practice for weeks for this one moment. One guy hangs off the front of the boat and grabs a flag.
After Chinese New Year's some local boys dress as a dragon and dance in the shops to bring luck. I don't know if they get paid for it.
	During every typhoon the river floods. This was one of the worst years.
Not everyone minds, some people take advantage of the good fishing.
	I see this many mornings, the hills to the south of BiTan are like a mystical Daoist landscape. It looks even nicer from the angles where you can't see all the buildings.
The old men like to sit here and play board games.
	Behind my house is a 200 year old Daoist temple named TaiPing Gong, or Palace of Great Peace. It gets a little noisy sometimes with their rituals, but it is a beautiful temple.
After I got my new DSLR camera I sat down to play with it on an old dock by the river. This the the pix below are some of my first shots. Not bad for a first try I thought. This BiTan toward the north.
	The skyline of BiTan on the opposite side of the river from my. The church with the steeple is new, I don't even think it has opened yet.
Annie pops out of the shrub way up on a cliff above the river. I had just called her back, she was getting to close to the edge. That is a scary place, I usually keep her leash on up here.
	Steps uphill, deep in the forest in an abandoned park.
And old pathway through the jungle.
	More steps in the jungle.
Just playing with the camera, two seats from the abandoned mountain park.
	Annie waits impatiently for me to come down the steps.
A beetle I met.
	An abandoned building, maybe an outhouse, in the old park. I'm thinking about storing some of my stuff in here. There's only a narrow path to get to it and I don't think many people come this way anyway.
Another old building, same place.
	Top of the DaFo Monastery on the same hill.
A large statue of GuanYin, the bodhisatva of mercy, at a local Buddhist temple.

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