The Japanese architectural heritage is a customized guide by chema

The Japanese ruled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. During that half a century they left their mark on many fields of the Taiwanese culture.

One of the most interesting is the architectural heritage they left in the capital of the country.

The colonization period gave to the Japanese the chance to built, not only traditional buildings, but also a lot of experimental ones; some of them really bizarre.

Here are some of the best ones:

The Japanese architectural heritage is a customized guide by chema

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The Travel BlogCamp is an informal networking event held in London during the World Travel Market.

Last year over 80 people took part from around the travel industry, including travel bloggers and journalists, to discuss travel blogs and social media.

Speakers for Travel BlogCamp 2009 are Murray Harrold (Advantage Travel), Joel Brandon-Bravo (Frommer’s), Guillaume Thevenot (Hotel Blogs), Eva Keogan (Lastminute.com), Darren Cronian (Travel Rants) and moderated by Kevin May (Tnooz)

Iwannagothere will be sponsoring the event :)

Hope to see you there!

All about the Travel BlogCamp

After a week voting for your favorite place we have a winner!

The winner place is Ice bar in London

The temperature is about -5°C all year so if you need to refresh your mind and body, this is a really fun place to go during summer.

Congratulations  Mathilde!

You can have a look to our 10 finalists votes!

Adriii finaly got the time to do her long-time expected train-trip through the north-east coast of the United States… and she is telling us about her journey!

We had to take the train to Philly today early in the afternoon so we decided to wake up early and walk the fifth avenue from the 31st street to the 59th. This avenue deserves its fame; it’s full of high-class stores like Tiffany’s or Prada. If you want to see Spartans-like man, go inside Abercrombie… they have that kind of guys helping you with your shopping but almost all the time they’re taking pictures with the costumers : P

Once in the 59th street, there’s the Apple Store, so we went inside to check our emails before going to the famous toy store F.A.O. Swartz. I’m kind of a toy lover so for me this store was amazing. They have areas for everything and the teddy bears area blew my mind xD I also loved the Lego and Harry Potter zones but the best thing about it it’s that they have the Big Piano Tom Hanks played on its movie “Big”. It’s great because you can play it! (Remember to put on your nice socks, by the way :P)

So, it was about time to go to the station and we arrived there earlier than we thought so we decided to have lunch in the Dinner in front of Penn Station. Great choice! Big plates of tasty American food, so 90s typical atmosphere and we had a lot of leftovers for the train journey.

Two hours and a half later, we were in Philadelphia trying to find our way to de hostel. It seemed to be quite far so we took a cab. If you go there and to the same hostel, take a cab: it’s so far away.

I have to admit that the place is beautiful. The Hostelling international mansion is right in the middle of Fairmount Park, a really big green are with a lot of things to do. Downtown was too far away and we had a curfew at the hostel so we decided to take a walk through the park. It is certainly beautiful and it gives you a great skyline of the city.
It was a long day so it was time to eat some of the lunch leftovers and go to bed. Tomorrow we just had one single day to visit Philadelphia so it’s going to be a long tiring day.

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Chema is living in Taipei (Taiwan) where he teaches Spanish. Before that he was living for 2 years in Tokyo, 1 of them studying Japanese in Takushoku university.

Betel nuts (檳榔 – Binlang in Chinese) is the name use to called, by association, a mixture of the betel leaves with the areca nuts, wrapped in a package and spread with lime and pepper to be chewed together. The mixture produces a strong and bitter juice with a taste a little bit similar to licorice, that gets your mouth tinted in red. The practice of chewing betel nuts is an ancient tradition all over Southeast Asia, including Taiwan, where the betel nuts occupy an important place in the country’s agricultural production.

Betel nuts kiosks are also common throughout the area, but in Taiwan they experienced a particular phenomenon during the 60’s, turning them into an important icon of the modern Taiwanese culture. In that decade, the so called Shuangdong Girls opened a new kind of betel nuts kiosk in Guoxing (Nantou County) using a new “marketing strategy”: the kiosk had a brightly lit glass enclosure so you could see the young female sellers easily from outside wearing revealing clothing. The main consumers of betel nuts were men, so the strategy was such a success that this new kiosks spread throughout the country along with their neon lights.

Nowadays, Betel nuts beauties can be found all along the roads and highways of the country selling betel nuts, cigarettes and drinks. Anyway, although Betel nuts beauties appear also in urban settings, in the cities the most of the kiosks are held by older women or even whole families without any sexual marketing strategy. As you go farther from urban cores, the number of betel nut girls increase gradually.

Any foreigner will see this practice as a kind of exploitation or even as a hidden red light business, but the truth is, despite some critics, debates and timid regulations such as the one made by Taoyuan County Government in 2002 mandating Betel nut beauties to cover up their breasts, bellies, and hips, Taiwanese society doesn’t seem too worried about the issue, and neither the kiosks nor their vendors suffer any kind of discrimination from their neighborhoods.

The Japanese photographer Masato Seto published in 2008 a photo-album called “Binran”.
Eva Tang wrote an interesting article about the issue in culture.tw.

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Adriii finaly got the time to do her long-time expected train-trip through the north-east coast of the United States… and she is telling us about her journey!

I keep telling you about our third day in New York. When finished at the Trattoria Spaguetto, we began to walk to lower Manhattan, visiting in our way there the SoHo area. We discovered that the name means “South Houston”, which is a street that divides the island horizontally. There you can find tons of on-fashion stores, and not just clothes places. Also it’s a good place to wander around if you like art. There’re lots of galleries there.

Then we reached TriBeCa, which means “Triangle Below Canal Street”. Nop, New Yorkers didn’t break their minds with the names… numbers for the streets, and street-referenced names for the neighborhoods. TriBeCa was once a warehouse area but several years ago, it became to be the little Hollywood of Manhattan and all the warehouses became expensive lofts. We loved the Greene Street, nice modern architecture there, and we stayed for a while in front of the Tribeca Grill, a place owned by Robert de Niro, to wait for some famous people.

A while later, and no star-sighting, we walked the River Terrace Park, a nice park in the Hudson riverside; New Jersey can be seen from there.

That was all for the neighborhoods so we came back to Greene street to take the subway to the Bryant Park, where we were meeting some friends. It’s a really good place to have a chat so we took something to drink and tell each other about our day.  After a visit to the HBO store, we went to the Public Library to take a look but some event was taking place so we could just see it from the outside.

Wow, what a day… it was already time to eat something for dinner and go rest. Up in the terrace, eating something we bought at a grocery store next to the hostel, we met an Irish guy that had been travelling around the globe for 11 months! Actually, he was just two days away from the “trip anniversary”. We had an interesting conversation about his journey for a while and then went to bed thinking about if we were capable of doing something like that.

Would you like to join us? Calling all seasoned backpackers!

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Are you planning to visit Barcelona soon? Then you have to watch these video guides at videosfrombarcelona.com!

You will find fresh clip videos made by Gina about her city, Barcelona. People that live in Barcelona loves to talk about their city, and who better than someone from Barcelona to show you the Barcelona tricks.

A taste about how the streets are, how metro works, what to eat, what to know wich things are imprescindible and a lot of tips that you will enjoy of knowing before your stay.

If after watching these videos, you can’t wait to go to Barcelona… go on and start creating your own customized guide!

Sign up here! Let’s discover Barcelona!

Adriii finaly got the time to do her long-time expected train-trip through the north-east coast of the United States… and she is telling us about her journey!

We called today “the neighborhoods day”. We decided to walk through the different areas of Manhattan so we took the subway to Chinatown to start there. If you are thinking about going to Chinatown, don’t do it in the morning; It is famous for the stores that sell imitations but at that time everything was closed. But the bazaars were open, big selling-everything stores great to buy some gifts like Kamman food.

Then, it was little Italy time. The neighborhood was celebrating some anniversary and the main street was decorated and full of Italian food restaurants and shops. Someone told us that Little Italy is no that little anymore because day after day they “take land” to the Chinese.

Somehow, we found ourselves walking with no specific destination and we ended up in the East River Park at the beginning of Williamsburg Bridge. Nice place and views but don’t waste your time going there if you have a few days in the city.

It was time to go to the Greenwich Village so we took a bus and walk through that area. We, of course, visited the Friends building and began to look for a place to eat. We chose the Trattoria Spaguetto among the restaurants of the area and it was a really good choice. So fair-prized and the pasta that we ate was delicious.

We were ready to continue our neighborhoods visits but I’ll keep telling you about it in the next post ;)

Would you like to join us? Calling all seasoned backpackers!

Willing to share your hidden gems with your fellow backpacker enthusiasts?
If so, we’re willing to share our love in the form of some well-deserved cash!
Email us at backpackreporter@iwannagothere.com to learn more.