Daan Park

A mere three days in Taiwan was nevertheless enough to make me crave a little nature.  I miss the wide swaths of green in the US and the UK: overgrowing parks in Macon, bench-dotted college lawns in Oxford, pathside expanses of trees in Peachtree City. Taipei seems to have greenery in very limited quantities. I see potted plants dangling from tenth-story windows; I see patches of scraggly grass peeking through the pavement. I need trees! So, when Linnea--a brilliant American girl who arrived a couple of days before I did--offered to take me to Daan Park, I agreed immediately.

Daan Park is, unsurprisingly, in the Da'an district in central Taipei. It has the typical city-park feel: it is a carefully-manicured set of lawns and paths and trees, hemmed in on all sides by high-rise apartments and office buildings. The city smells and sounds still surround me in the park, but they're all muffled a little, like the sudden quiet that comes from dipping underwater at a crowded pool. At Daan, roots carpet the ground, whose softness feels strange after the endless sea of concrete that is the rest of the city. Knotty, knobbly trees rise from the ground at irregular intervals, providing a very welcome reprieve from the merciless Taipei sun (side note: it's really flippin' hot here. Like, all the dang time).

One of most unexpected attractions of the park is the presence of foot massage paths. These little trails are set off a bit from the main lanes of the park, and they are studded with smooth stones. The neat rows of protruding rocks are meant to provide therapy to anyone who walks across them. You're meant to step on each stone so that it presses into the arch of your foot, stretching the muscle a little and relieving the tension that you've undoubtedly built up from all that standing-around-in-MRT-trains and walking-on-concrete you've been doing all day.

The stones feel amazing. I keep a tennis ball under my desk for this exact purpose: if you haven't tried rolling your foot around on something smooth and round, do it. I even got adventurous enough to remove my shoes  and try walking across the stones. My life flashed before my eyes as I nearly fell to a pointy, stony doom, but it was totally worth it.

In addition to the obviously immense draw that stone footpaths provide, the park also has a lot of natural beauty. Pretty bushes and trees are everywhere, dripping with Asian-indigenous flowers and fruits that I've never seen before.

Anyway, it was refreshing to step away from the throngs of people--who have much smaller personal-space bubbles than that to which I am accustomed--and the clouds of exhaust and smog and frying noodles, and the oppressive cityscape. Despite its distance from my apartment, I feel sure that I will be spending more time in Daan.