Taipei Botanical Gardens

A few weekends ago, I visited the Taipei Botanical Gardens (Nanhai Rd, maintained by the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute http://www.tfri.gov.tw/). The park was full of families of all ages walking, exercising, stretching, resting, eating, photographing plants and painting. With plenty of shady spots to rest, the park is well designed and an easy place to spend a couple of hours on a lazy weekend.

The park included a traditional building (the purpose of which I was unclear, but below is a painting on one of its walls), a large pond, and plenty of walking trails across little streams and bridges and through a variety of botanical genres. I even spotted a hothouse full of carniverous plants (no photo included below to prevent nightmares!)

Cosplay at NTU

This afternoon I happened to spy a large crowd of people clustering around costumed adults and taking their photos. Taking place at National Taiwan University outside a cartoon convention, some of these costumes were quite elaborate.

Cosplay (コスプレ, kosupure), short for "costume play", is basically describing a performing-art behaviour of self-rigging out as a character with corresponding costume, accessories and/or parameters. In society, interactions of "cosplay" behaviour form a subculture centered on dressing as characters from manga, anime, tokusatsu, video games, and less commonly, fantasy movies, Japanese pop music bands, Visual Kei, fantasy music stories (such as stories by the band Sound Horizon), novels, and anything in the real world being unique and dramatic (or their more anthropomorphic form). In some circles "cosplay" has been expanded to mean simply wearing a costume, without considering the mind of an actor and the common form of "cosplay" in a major "cosplay" culture.

Source: Wikipedia.com

The characters were more than happy to pose for photos. Here are some of my favourites: