This city, with its markets, traditions and long history was an eye-opener for me. From the high school girls who could speak English - I was teaching at that level in Japan at that time and Japanese kids were (are) no where near the same level - to people drinking snake bile & blood, from helpful people in the street to the graphic design store called Betelnut I discovered along my long walks, Taipei was very charming. It's only a pity that I didn't go to the Taipei National Museum because it holds more that 4000 oracle bones on which the first Chinese characters were written during the Shang Dynasty more than 3000 years ago. My interest in kanji hadn't reached that level of interest at the time due to the fact that I'd only been in Japan for 4 months.