Everyone at Lightbox knows I like to walk. It’s a running joke at the library that my perception of distances uses a “New York City” ruler as its form of measurement: I really don’t think a 45 minute train ride is seriously that long and I will always gladly do a 30 minute walk. Very New Yorker, apparently. 

When you tell people that you like to walk, it’s a very easy hop and skip away from the assumption that you like to do other walking adjacent activities. Ex: Hiking. As someone who was raised in New York City, the worst hike I usually have to do is when the escalators at Lex-53rd or Hudson Yards are somehow broken. I hike in the metropolitan sense, exclusively. So, after getting nearly 10 different recommendations from different people about the best places to hike in Taipei and beyond, I finally took the bait. 

This past weekend, I embarked on my first solo hike ever. I went to the peak of Qixingshan, a dormant volcano which also happens to be the highest point in Taipei. It has an elevation of 1,120 meters above sea level and overlooks the all of Taipei City, the Taipei Basin, and the East China Sea’s shoreline. 

It was absolutely stunning and, in hindsight, I do not regret doing the hike at all. While I was going up and down, however, that’s another story. All I have to say is that Taipei has very scary bugs and animals that make very scary purge-like sounds and that hiking with running sneakers without any grip is not a smart decision after a rainy morning (a free slip-and-slide). 

I am not going to start going around and saying that I like to hike, but I would like a free pass to at least mention it 5 times randomly in conversation this upcoming school year. This was definitely something new to me, but I feel like I can now definitively say that I’ve hit all of the categories of Taipei’s major attractions: food, art / culture, and, now, nature! 

While this was an especially productive day off for me, I usually spend my days off going to art and history museums in the city. I want to go to as many as I can while I am here, and have made it to around 25 as of writing this. I am a food tourist at heart, so my nights have been spent finding restaurants (or shaved ice places) that I want to try and then just walking around the area afterwards. 

I ended up at an Ikea the other weekend while visiting an aquarium. I’m in pursuit of unconventional tourism, I guess. 

Highlight reel: average of 14,000 steps, had my first traditional Taiwanese dinner with the Lightbox team (+ the professional jurors for the New Wave Award!!), and rode on an electric scooter for the first time (shoutout to my co-intern Tommy). The Dragon Boat Festival is coming up soon, which should be exciting! Hopefully this will make up some sadness I had about not being in the city for the Knicks win. 

Oh, and Lightbox flooded. BTS photos of us cleaning up.