I’m now up to apartment number 10 in Stockholm in the four years I’ve been here. It will be the last for a while, though — I’m moving to Cairo at the end of February. More about that below. First, November and December.

November started with a trip to Taipei for the Swedish Institute. I arrived to what felt like the set of Blade Runner — rain-washed pavements glistening under bright animated advertising, throngs of mopeds driven by people in neon parkas, outdoor night markets selling strangely shaped foods, and a city of shopping malls surrounding Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building.

Taipeians have a ferocious appetite for consumption, and for selling. In my jetlagged night-time walks, I chanced upon Eslite, a 24-hour multilingual bookshop that slots into a solid third place in my list of favorites, after Foyles of London and Powells of Portland, Oregon. This sense that the city never sleeps is something I haven’t felt since New York — and there are many more clues that Taipei is, consciously or not, fashioning itself as the Gotham of the East. Taipei 101 looks very much like one of the Twin Towers in a pagoda suit. In front of it sits an edition of Robert Indiana’s Love, which also has a home on 6th Avenue.

And the latest meme to invade Taipei is the coffee shop, with local chains carefully studying the methods of a famous American brand, down to the logo, but adding a certain Eastern existential je-ne-sais-quoi…

Alas, my stupid Nikon D70 decided to stop working after my very first foray into the city — I was looking forward to making a photographic essay of Engrish coffee shop signs.

Taipei never ceased to impress.
My only wish — that we’d also be told how long we have to wait before the light goes green again. Later, a friend who had visited Beijing told me this is the case there.When crossing wide boulevards, pedestrians are helpfully given their time left, in seconds, before they need to get to the other side. The little green man starts running faster as the seconds run down. I found these hyperlocal planning tools everywhere, down to subway platform markings showing where the doors of the carriages will open, and where to stand to allow passengers a quick exit.

Finally, lest I should start to doubt that I was in an Asian city, every so often I was confronted by something like this:

Yes, it’s the iGallop, in the front window of a shop in Taipei’s most upmarket mall. Is it USB-powered, you think? It’d make a great game controller for a cowboy-themed first-person shoot’em-up…

The second half of November and the first week of December, Felix and Michelle went on a cruise to Antarctica, one of the few places on Earth where you cannot blog from. Coincidence? It certainly meant Felix needed a guest blogger for his day-blog, Economonitor, and so I managed to take three weeks off from work and blogged pretty much full time about economics news. Not having watched marcoëconomic events unfold with an eagle-eyed gaze these past few years, it was certainly a daunting prospect, but the opportunity to read just about any economics blog I could lay my mouse on and then mouthing off to a wide readership prepped by Felix was a fantastic change of topic, work-wise.

As if to compensate for those three weeks of sedentary pursuits, I then travelled to Edinburgh for the Swedish Institute, my first visit (but certainly not my last) to this wonderful city. I managed to take some time off to walk all over the place, visiting those pubs that have a particularly good reputation for their whisky selection — among them Kay’s and The Bow Bar.

PS: I’ve been acutely aware these past two months that if I don’t write to this particular blog (as opposed to my other blog), I will forget in years hence where I lived at the time of writing; not because I write about the apartments I happen to live in (I haven’t), but because I remember the rituals of writing when I reread my posts, and these rituals involve pacing about, making coffee, and staring out of windows — with different rooms, kitchens and views each time that I move.
 
Reïnhabiting the spaces where I lived, in turn, reminds me of my state of mind at the time. So while this website may look like a blog, it has become a big cryptic memory palace to me.Also in December, a push to get International Polar Year’s new IPY.org site out the door. It’s almost ready — you can check it out here in the meantime. And then it was Christmas in London, where the niece stole the show.

All this left little time for reading books, but I did manage to squeeze in Spinoza: A Life and Absurdistan.

Which leaves us with plans for 2007. Since I deliver almost all my work via the internet, it’s time to take advantage of that fact and move to Cairo, where they also have broadband. I’ll be there for three months for starters, from March to May. I’m already reading up on the place. Expect much more blogging here in the coming year.