A half-day Trip Around Hsinchu City Center: A tour with our Two Friends with Special Abilities

Field Trip Itinerary

Train / Bus Station
Riverside Park
City Government Plaza
Youth library
Art's Center

Field Trip Schedule

There they are rocking on their wheelchairs, two women with special needs, our happy surveyors for our accessible tourism trip. “These are two good spirited women”, I told myself at first sight. Among a group of seven students of NCTU’s New Product Development course, 2017 Spring semester, we started our trip at the heart of Hsinchu city which being the Train station. Are we going to see some of the challenges faced by those two good spirited women, on wheelchairs and others alike? Will our observations help us come up with a new product idea that can enhance the city travel experience of people with Special needs(handicap)? Well! Just follow our ride as we take you to our trip experience. Hopefully, with some of our travel tips, you can go out there someday and discover it yourself –It’s fun! Apart from Hsinchu Train/Bus Station, The Riverside Park, The City Government Plaza, The Youth Library, and The Art’s center are among the sites we’ve visited.

Hsinchu Train/Bus Station

For a general visitor, we recommend to arrive by train or by bus, which we start at the center of Hsinchu City. Like any other weekend, Hsinchu train/bus station was buzzling with locomotive passengers, each hastier than the other. Due to the dense of population around here, the place began to shrink through my gigantic eyes. With plenty of things to see in this area, like the plaza, just across the station and department stores, visitors can hang around the downtown area as much as they like.

As soon as I tend to finish telling myself that the place was probably just small, we were faced with a giant elevator which stands entirely separated from the Station’s building. The friendly designed elevator, was there to make travelling back and forth the Train Station much easier, without much hassle. We asked our special two great-spirited women if they would like to try the elevator; to our dismay, they didn’t want to give it a try. What might have stopped them from willing to try it? Would they have preferred a specially designed elevator just for special people like them or haven been inspired by them?

Riverside park

Riverside Park tend to outrun Hsinchu Train/Bus Station when it comes to space. It goes a long way even crossing the East gate of Hsinchu city. The river’s water is shallow and crystal clear so much so that it even allowed us to see ourselves through it. This place was packed with people, mostly children who enjoys playing with the river water and also the elderly who capitalizes on the park’s good work-out equipment while some bunch of families also enjoy relaxing picnic.

Government Hall

From the Riverside Park, we channeled our trip towards the City Government Hall. Designed to be sustainable and good looking, the place is full of spacious rooms to hold events such as New Year’s Eve Countdown. It really looks like a place to be, besides it was built to earn the respect of the citizens and make them have a positive mind about the government.

Beef Noodles

For lunch, there is a Beef Noodles store around here that you can enjoy. The spaciousness of the place will absolutely surprise you. And off-course, the food there is nothing but spectacular. The tomato flavored beef noodles tastes just like how they did fifty years ago, and the dumplings are crafty enough that you feel not only the filling, but the dumpling skin as well.

The Youth Library

The Youth Library was the fourth place we visited and It was worth our visit. The library is crammed with comic books- youth fascinating, right? There are enough desks to study at, plus game spaces. Games like Croquet are the order of the day there. Most elderly people gather there playing Croquet from Monday to Sunday. We challenge you to try out your game skills with them.

Hsinchu Art’s Center

A nice wrap up for our trip was the Hsinchu Art’s Center of was, together with the city’s Cultural Bureau, which also has a library inside. Most of the art performances requiring tickets are usually held in the art’s center, the same goes for music contests and gallery exhibition. The art’s center has wheelchairs to borrow, and the facilities are perfectly OK for people with all conditions. You can also ask for help as there are many volunteers watching out for your needs.

After a nice afternoon experiencing the artistic culture of the city, we would invite you to stay a little while longer for some snacks and coffee. The 1868 café is nice enough to have chargers for electric wheelchairs. Our two special friends enjoyed the privilege of topping up their wheelchair’s charge while enjoying the coffee and delicacies this Café has to offer The view there is just as awesome, and to add a cherry on top, along with performance tickets, you can get special offers and discounts for their merchandise!

This trip not only gave us a memorable experience of the City, but also reminded us and allowed us to see some of the very important things we tend to not notice travelling alone. Our two good-spirited friends with special abilities helped us to see some of the ground problems, barriers, steep slopes, small and badly designed spaces for wheelchairs, some badly adjusted tourist attractions for people on low wheelchairs and the lack of charging spots for electronic wheelchairs around the vicinities of Hsinchu City center.

Transportation - How to get there