I asked my Taiwanese friend what he liked most about living in Taipei. “The people are very friendly, and you can always find something delicious to eat, whatever the time,” was his refreshingly simple reply.For visitors who feel impelled to collect at least one cultural set-piece from a city, the place to go is the National Palace Museum. The Imperial Chinese art collection spent years being shunted around mainland China to evade first Japanese troops, then Communism. So a small island with 20 million people finds itself with a collection miraculously disproportionate to its size.

Even though the museum is the city’s most imposing building, it can display only a fraction of the contents at any one time. Like Taipei itself, there is much more to it than meets the eye.The only airline with direct flights between the UK and Taipei is Eva Air (020-7380 8300), which flies four times a week from Heathrow via Bangkok, for £639 return through Easy Travel (01473 214305). “I was walking along the road with two friends The sun set I felt a great sadness Suddenly the sky became blood red I stopped, leaned against the railings, dead tired. And saw the flaming clouds as blood over the blue-black fjord and city My friends walked on I stood there trembling with angst. And I sensed a loud, unending scream pierce nature.” These words, written shortly after his walk, led to his painting The Scream. They contain some of the sense of inner anguish conveyed by the lone figure standing beneath a turbulent sunset; his eyes and mouth wide open, his hands clamped to bulging temples. No painting sums up the alienation and isolation of modern life like The Scream by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.

After the Mona Lisa, it is one of the most recognised paintings in the world. The idea came to Munch while he was walking in the wooded hills above Oslo more than a century ago, following a bout of heavy drinking “I was walking along the road with two friends The sun set I felt a great sadness Suddenly the sky became blood red I stopped, leaned against the railings, dead tired. If you alight at Sjomannsskolen, there are no signposts indicating the artistic importance of the site. But cross the road and enter the grounds to a business training centre that used to be the former Seaman’s School, and you will stumble across a fine view of the city and fjord. Coincidentally, some of the oldest known examples of art in Norway lie carved into a granite rock to the left of the entrance. You can only just discern the worn outlines of deer and elk picked out in red; still, they have been left out in the wet for 6,000 years.Armed with a copy of the picture, you can try to work out where Munch must have paused that day. A small path below the school leads down a grassy slope to a rail reminiscent of the one in the painting.

But there is another, further down, closer to the shore of the Oslo Fjord. The rutted track the artist shows is now a busy road leading to Sweden.The several versions of The Scream were not, of course, intended to be exact depictions of reality, but to represent his tortured state of mind He made a point of painting from memory. However, on a fine morning it is difficult to feel the terrible angst that seized him Oslo lies spread out beneath you like a map. Near the top of the opposite hills stands the scimitar shape of Holmenkollen, the ski jump built for the 1952 Winter Olympics. Hugging the far side of the fjord, two steeply pitched roofs stand out. These are the museums housing the Kon-Tiki and Nansen’s polar ship Fram – each a venerable reminder that Norway scores higher on heroic maritime history than it does for fine art (or Eurovision Song Contests).Beneath you, on the right, at the fjord’s apex, stands a large redbrick box building, with twin square towers. Radhus, the City Hall, was completed just before the Second World War.