Taipei by day: the important thing is to get lost

Getting lost in Taipei City is the most common activity among not many Western tourists. A little because the maps are mostly written in Chinese and - in the thicket of causeways - the locator on your iPhone flashes thirty metres higher. But mostly because of the computer shops: Guanghua Market and the surrounding streets are to electronics what San Giovanni Rotondo is to Padre Pio's souvenirs.

Entering and leaving the crammed shops, all the same, it is normal to get lost and find that you have gone backwards. The prices? Affordable, especially for local brands (Acer and Htc, for example), slightly lower for Apple, but the range of iPhone gadgets is as varied as one can imagine.

The other typical local product - excluding ceramics - is wholesale clothes: the Wufenpu shopping area, near Songshan Station and the Raohe night market (the oldest and one of the most beautiful), is a great place. T-shirts cost a few euros (the ones in 'English' full of mistakes are a must).

On the other hand, with the exception of the magnificent National Palace Museum (which contains the largest collection of ancient Chinese art in the world), for the other daytime attractions in Taipei City you'll get by in no time. An ascent to Taipei 101, the second tallest skyscraper on the planet, doesn't take long: the lift is the fastest in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records!

A visit to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, possibly under the blazing sun to make the experience even more mystical, won't take you more than half an hour; twice as long if you want to watch the changing of the guard: Taiwanese rhythm is not the Japanese one, and just as the guards take a good twenty minutes of stop-motion movements to change places (the slowest changing of the guards in the world?), so life in the metropolis flows frenetically, but not too much.

Just beyond the large statue of the Father of the Fatherland, portrayed with a placid expression of Buddhist serenity, are the National Theatre and the Concert Hall: play around to discover the differences between the two buildings. Or, numbed by the rhythm of the guards and the heat, stop and watch the dozens of kids rehearsing hip hop choreographies in the shade of the sloping roof.