After spending New Year’s Eve in Singapore last year, we figured we need to stay put for at least one NYE while we’re still living in Taiwan. This is now “year 100” for Taiwan — 100 years since the founding of Taiwan so the planned fireworks were supposed to surpass those of years past. There are various celebrations in downtown Taipei, including rooftop parties at some hotels — but there were no rooms available! Well, unless you wanted to pay $300 US or more for a three night stay. Rather hard to justify when you live 20 minutes away.
Instead, we opted to stay home and watch the fireworks from our own rooftop deck. We live on the top floor of a 24 story building and the rooftop deck has a great view of Taipei 101 so why pay hundreds of dollars to be closer? The last few weeks have been unseasonably cold and New Year’s Eve was no exception. Several of Brett’s coworkers were scheduled to come over and we were just going to have a low key party at home. Before the first guests even arrived, the night took a dramatic turn. I heard a horrible crash in the kitchen and turned around to find Brett on the floor. He ran into one of the kitchen cabinet doors and opened his head up pretty good. Thankfully one of the neighbors who was on the way over is a nurse and she confirmed he needed to get to the hospital.
Unlike emergency care I’m used to in the United States, Brett was in the ER, stitched up and on his way back home before two hours had passed even! He arrived with nearly two hours to spare before the fireworks went off at midnight. The best part — less than $30 US for everything, including round-trip cab fare. You gotta love Taiwan!
Being the paranoid one I am, I wanted to stake out the best spot on the roof as I figured the rest of the apartments would be up there too. We left our cheap tripod up there about 11:00pm and went back up around 11:45pm to find quite a few people up there….see, paranoia justified!
We got settled in and camera ready, but I had a horrible time with a long exposure at the tripod was not tall enough and the winds were pretty bad. It was moving my camera on the block wall so most of my shots came out terrible until I went to a fast shutter speed. Unfortunately, the two minute show flew by and the sadly, the fireworks were not as spectacular as we had hoped. We had read the star of the show was to be a dragon going up the side of Taipei 101, but from our vantage point, it was not that impressive. In spite of that, we did enjoy seeing all of Taipei lit up as fireworks went off all around us.
After the fireworks had ended, Taipei 101 changed the lighting to read “ROC 100” on the side to represent Taiwan’s 100th year anniversary. I believe it’s on display through the upcoming Chinese New Year celebrations.
One of the highlights of the show was watching the number “100” in fireworks.
Rather than shoot a lot of fireworks off the sides of Taipei 101 as they’ve done in the past, they lit up the building with smaller fireworks.
After Taipei 101 came alive in color, we believe the next set of fireworks was the “dragon” that was to snake around Taipei 101. Based on our direction from 101, we might have not seen much of the dragon itself.
Although we didn’t get to see much of the “dragon”, we were treated to fireworks with some amazing colors!
To see more of the New Year’s Eve Fireworks from Taipei 101, please be sure to check out the gallery below.
