To be fair, I did a few touristy things–the Centre Pompidou, which I missed my first time, being the chief example–but the rest of the time was mostly spent walking and biking through the impossibly beautiful streets and just getting lost in the atmosphere of the place. And eating extremely well. Pâté sandwich for lunch? Sure. Pâté for dinner? Why not. Splurge on some fancy meals? Why, yes, indeed.

I recently learned that Paris is the most visited city in the world. If you’ve never been, do yourself a favor. Go, and help Paris keep this well-deserved status.

First, let’s visit Dr. Sun:

I love this building’s fusion of modern Western architecture and traditional Chinese architecture. I haven’t seen many examples of this style in my travels in Korea and Japan, so I take note whenever I see them.

Inside, there’s a decidedly Lincoln-esque statue of Sun:

Unlike at the Lincoln Memorial, though, the Sun memorial is flanked by two guards, who change shifts in an elaborate ceremony once per hour:

Perhaps once this was a symbol of Taiwan’s militarized state, but with mandatory conscription on its way out and tensions with mainland China at low levels, this sort of thing becomes the exception, not the norm:

In fact, many of the tourists in the crowd were from mainland China. This is more due to Sun’s historical good standing with the Chinese Communists than any recent developments, but I found their presence to be telling nonetheless.

I doubt there were many mainland China visitors to the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial, though. Chiang was stridently anti-Communist and presided over years of Taiwanese belligerence to the mainland. He also had a bit of a cult of personality, which lives on after his death in a gargantuan memorial campus that includes two concert halls and a memorial hall.

First, one of the concert halls:

Second, the monument itself:

Inside, there’s a seated statue of Chiang, similar to Sun:

Below the monument, there’s a museum full of artifacts from Chiang’s life, but the most interesting part was this undeniably creepy wax statue of Chiang in a recreation of his office:

He belongs in the same class of creepiness as the animatronic presidents of the US in Disney World or Tom Hanks in The Polar Express.

That last bit of creepiness aside, these two memorials are both beautiful and impressive sights to see as well as fascinating insights into the complex history of modern China. Sun and Chiang were larger than life men, as are the memorials erected in their honor.

Aesthetically, the temple is beautiful. Check out the detail on one of the dragons that adorn the roof:

But the most interesting thing about the temple was the people that came to worship. My knowledge on the theology/cosmology of Longshan and other Taiwanese temples is a bit thin–according to Wikipedia, “the Temple worships a mixture of Buddhist, Taoist, and folk deities such as Matsu”–but whoever these folks were praying to, they were taking it pretty seriously:

Here’s some video of the action. Be sure to have your sound on; the effect of the droning, unison chanting of thousands of worshippers is truly other-worldly:

Imagine, if you will, a densely packed outdoor market where you can buy clothes, electronics, accessories…and the craziest fried Chinese food in the world. Like corn dogs stuffed with french fries:

Welcome to a Taipei night market. My pictures won’t be able to capture the energy, the tastes…or the smells…of these vibrant scenes, so do yourself a favor and go to Taipei to see them for yourself.

I had never been in the presence of so many…novel…food products in my life. These are Chinese burritos, for lack of a better description:

These are flaky buns stuffed with peppered beef and scallions:

These guys? Chicken butts:

Fried bread, wrapped in a thin flatbread. I call it Chinese meta-bread:

And as if there weren’t enough open flames among the food vendors, the merchandise vendors were happy to add their own:

And as if you didn’t need any more reminders that this is a place very different from the United States, I leave you with this image of some very young night market workers. I suppose child labor isn’t as taboo and/or regulated in Taipei as it is in the West:

I don’t mean to end on a down note. The night markets are fantastic. They’re just very different from our more orderly, less chaotic lives in the West. And that’s far from a bad thing. As long as these kids still have time for their homework.

First, here’s a typical Taipei streetscape:

Yup, lots of drab, utilitarian concrete buildings. This is what happens to architecture when buildings need to go up cheaply and quickly in a rapidly modernizing and growing city. No time for the picturesque brownstones we’re spoiled by in New York City.

Next, here’s a typical Taipei roadway:

No, it’s not some sort of scooter race, it’s just the the way a large portion of commuters chose to move about the city.

The drab building and scooters that are so prevalent in Taipei give the city a bit of a third world quality, so you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Taipei has a booming electronics and manufacturing industry and is home to one of the tallest building in the world, Taipei 101:

This beautiful structure anchors a chic commercial district that would be at home in any major world city.

Lastly, lest you think that the Asian aesthetic is absent in the modern Taipei landscape, let me end this first post with a picture of the National Palace Museum, a great example of traditional Chinese architecture brought into the 20th century:

This museum is a fascinating blend of the old and new: it was built fairly recently (in the mid-1960′s) to house artifacts from 2,000 years of Chinese history that were spirited out of the country by the Nationalists in advance of the Communist takeover of Beijing in 1948. The history is long, complex, and fascinating, so rather than try to summarize it here, I’ll do you a favor and point you to the Wikipedia article on the museum.

Coming up in future installments: Taipei’s famous night markets, Longshan temple pray-a-thon, and the ghosts of Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-Shek…

First stop was San Francisco, a city I visited for the first time last summer and am now quite taken with. In one long day of walking, I managed to go from The Mission…

To The Castro…

…all the way to the top of Twin Peaks!

Anyone who’s been to Twin Peaks will tell you that walking all the way up would be difficult at best, foolish at worst. Oh, well. Once I’d realized what I’d gotten myself into, I was way too far up the hill to turn back.

After making it back down, I did the sensible thing and took a bus ride to my next stops, the Presidio with its breathtaking views of the Golden Gate Bridge…

 …and the nearby Palace of Fine Arts, a breathtaking remnant of the  1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition:

The other major sightseeing day in the Bay Area was spent at Muir Woods, home of majestic redwood trees and refuge of renegade chimpanzees in the recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie:

I found it difficult to effectively communicate the scale of these trees in pictures, but hopefully the combination of these two gives you a sense of both their height and width:

Note the sweaters. The locals were complaining of the chilly weather, but I welcomed the break from the brutal humidity and heat of the New York summer!

After San Francisco, we hopped over to Golden, CO, home of my sister, my brother-in-law, and my too-cute-for-words 20 month old niece. Here she is with her mom and uncle in the Denver Botanic Garden:

The Gardens were also home to huge lily pads, which probably could have supported a small child’s weight.

Note: we did not get the chance to put this theory to test.

Of course, no visit to Golden is complete without a trip to Red Rocks, the aptly named concert venue and park. I’ve been several times, but this is the first time I was able to use an iPhone HDR app to try to capture the intense range of colors in this view:

 The last stop on the trip was a gathering of college friends by a lake in Northern Connecticut, Don’t let this tranquil scene fool you; for us, this lake is mostly associated with white-knuckle, high-speed motorboat tubing action.

OK, fine. Also barbecues, charades, and reading of magazines and novels in the sun.

All told, it was a great summer vacation. I saw the sights, visited with friends and family, played in the water, and most importantly, just relaxed. It’s all in the past now, but fortunately, Memorial Day 2012 is only nine short months away.

The photos should speak for themselves. If you ever have the opportunity to see something like this, by all means, go for it.

…and this is me in almost the same spot, in 2008…

…and here I am again, on my last trip in 2011:

Over the course of seven years, this part of the palace hasn’t changed. For the most part, my physical appearance hasn’t changed. Yet so much has changed with me and my relationship with Korea during that time.

During these seven years, my mother died, both of my siblings got married, and my father remarried. I worked at four different jobs and was about to start a fifth during the last trip. I lived at five different addresses in Korea, Alabama, and New York.

My life has changed in dramatic and sweeping ways, and yet the palace and I still look the same.

At the time of the first picture (2004), I struggled mightily with both the Korean language and my identity as a Korean. I had met dozens of relatives for the first time and could not reconcile the closeness of blood relations with the profound sense of alienation I felt from them due to language and culture gaps. At the time of my second picture (2008), I struggled less with the language and basic conversation with relatives, but still couldn’t fit myself into the larger context of The Korean People as I had just come off a rough year and a half working in a Korean-American community organization where I just did not fit in.

By the time of the last picture (2011), I had mostly come to terms with the fact that I would never feel like I truly belonged in any context that could be called “Korean,” be it in Korea or in the United States. Korea, Korean culture, and my relatives in Korea are only parts of my identity; however, they do not define my identity.

My sense of identity and comfort with it have grown tremendously, and yet the palace and I still look the same.

I find it oddly fitting that, in spite of all this change, and in spite of my feelings of Korea as a foreign land, this place, Gyeongbokgung Palace, acts as something of an anchor. It may be weird, and I may not be totally comfortable with it, but it’s not likely to go anywhere anytime soon. It’s been around for hundreds of years, was there on my last three trips, and will be there for my next three trips.

More to the point, though, it’s a reminder of the permanence of some things that persist in spite of incredible amounts of change in our lives. Fundamentally, I’m the same person I was in 2004 that I was in 2008 that I am in 2011. That person was shaped by forces hundreds if not thousands of years in the making. No amount of job changes or Korean language classes can change that.

The next time I return to Seoul, I hope to return to this spot and take another picture similar to these three. I hope I can use that as another occasion to take stock of my life: what’s changed and what hasn’t changed. I can only hope that I can say the same thing then that I can now: that with each additional picture, I found myself in a better place in my life than in the previous picture.