January 30: Yilan

Today we took a trip to Yilan with many students from the computer engineering department at Tatung. Yilan (or Ilan) is costal city about an hour to the southeast of Taipei. At one point in time the trip to Yilan took over two hours either by a long detour or along treacherous mountain roads, but now the freeway tunnels under the mountain. I counted 36 emergency exits that were approximately 300 meters apart to find a total length to the tunnel of 12000 meters long! You can see why this tunnel cut the travel time from Taipei to Yilan by more than an hour.


Yilan is a smaller city and I saw a lot of rice fields on the outskirts and even going into the city. The fields were the flooded paddy fields type of wet rice production. In the city we went to some presentations that the University of Yilan was giving. The presentations were about 3D imaging and pretty interesting. Although I could only look at the pictures, because the presentations were in Chinese. After that we had a very nice meal with 10 dishes to choose from. I tried everything and had some very good cod.


Now for the best part of the trip, visiting the National Center for Traditional Arts. The center is a nice little tourist village that was built to show and preserve aboriginal art. There is lots of things to see and, of course, buy. We could see people making bamboo furniture, pottery, and glassware. I saw an exhibit about weaving that had lots of very cool pieces. After a couple of hours at the folk art village, we went home.