12 october 2013, of masks and mopeds

I've been back over a week since my first ever few days in asia, but can recall some impressions of a brisk, tiring but highly stimulating trip. I was on a small mission to sell sustainable city services, which was very well endowed with ukti people, and then architects and designers, like fosters, trying to sell things like passivhaus regulation, and, rather less likely, personal trains. I was the only city and felt a bit like the star turn, speaking after the minister and getting sat next to his deputy at a formal dinner. We may yet even get some business from it. Meanwhile taipei was a whirlwind and my very brief impressions were of lots of tall buildings and small people, many in masks and on mopeds, which are stacked at traffic lights waiting to go. It was quite futuristic and has seen impressive and managed growth these last decades, including an extensive subway system not yet a decade old. We also spent a day on kinmen island, which is snug alongside the chinese mainland coast, has a potent liquor and is some way through a transformative economic programme designed to attract millions of chinese day trippers, in which it may yet succeed and so play a role in the bigger economic integration era that taiwan and the mainland are currently going through. A worthwhile use of a few days.