Now that John Groot has finished walking 1,200km around Taiwan’s coastline, he can rest his feet and autograph a few books.
Groot will be at the Lei Gallery in Taichung tomorrow to sign copies of his new book, Taiwanese Feet: My walk around Taiwan. It’s the last stop on a summer book tour that included events in the Taipei area and Kaohsiung.
Starting in 2006, Groot set out to walk clockwise around the island. Instead of doing it as a single trek, he broke it up into mostly day hikes and weekend outings. In all, it took him 83 days, spanning eight years.
Photo courtesy of John Groot
Taipei Times’ contributing reporter Bradley Winterton published a review of the book on April 23.
“I give myself a B for following the exact coastline,” said Groot, citing, for example, a decision not to scramble across a stretch of giant concrete tetrapods along the shoreline.
While not the first person to walk around the island, the 55-year-old jovial Canadian is the only one to have chronicled his adventure in book form. In addition to being a travelogue, the book recounts relevant historical events.
Photo courtesy of John Groot
At Saturday’s event, Groot will read excerpts from three sections, including one that describes a humorous incident at a Kaohsiung love motel.
Groot self-published the 222-page book, which is available in paperback and eBook format. He hopes to resume the book tour on the east coast later in the year.
Following the book signing, Groot will lead a discussion on exploring and writing about Taiwan. Afterwards, participants are invited to tour local bars as part of the Taiwanese Feet Beerwalk Pub Crawl.
As for future adventures and literary pursuits, Groot could only speculate for now. But he quickly added: “I’m not going to walk around the island again for sure.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby