Taipei and the 開源人年會

After Japan and Singapore, Taiwan is now the third Asian country I visited — albeit only for a few days. It’s always been on my bucket list of travel destinations. What set things in motion now was a co-worker telling me about 2025 開源人年會 / COSCUP 2025.

The event was packet with talks right up my alley like

• Open Source for Open Science
• Wikidata: Wikimedia’s knowledge graph in a world of generative AI
• The Status of Sinitic Languages and Formosan Languages in MediaWiki

… and I’m sure if I understood Mandarin I would’ve had an even harder time to choose which talks to listen to. Among the booths, I especially was happy to see and have a chat with the folks from Framework. All in all people were great, content was great, and since the event was held on a University campus I felt right at home. ^_^

In terms of Taiwan/Taipei in general:

Food

• Love the breakfast culture — especially 鹹豆漿.
• Love the fact there’s tonns of buffet style food places with tons of veggies (search for 素食 and 自助餐 to find them).
• The night markets don’t really align with my sleep cycle and eating habits, but I went once and enjoyed some “fried milk”, sweet potato balls, and a peanut ice cream roll.

Language

• I like “小心” (characters for small and heart), on signs calling for attention like “watch your step”.
• Found the localization of the Kinder Chocolate logo interesting. Where the original Roman alphabet rendition has six letters with the first in black and the remaining five in red, the loangraph rendition “健達” only has two characters. To avoid having half of the word mark in black, the color change is only applied to the radical of the first character — the “亻” of “健”.
• In some places I found Japanese to be understood more readily than English.

Misc

• Was able to try out several TEX keyboards at an INPAD store.
• The Taipei 101 tuned mass damper was cool.
• Realized that you have to hail busses just like in Singapore. Successfully did so on day three.
• Japan specific rather than about Taiwan, but: the trip was the first time I left Japan temporarily. Both of my previous long term stays in Japan were beginning to end, such that leaving Japan also meant having my 在留カード invalidated. This time I made use of the みなし再入国許可 system. You fill out a 再入国出国記録 and hand it to the immigration officer when leaving the country. Easy enough. When entering Japan again, there’s a special route for re-entry. Funnily enough, paths are first divided into “Japanese national” and “visitor” and then within the “visitor” path it branches off to “re-entry”. — I’m not a visitor I live here (ó﹏ò｡)

Hope to see you and enjoy your awesome breakfasts again, Taiwan. 謝謝!