You are looking at a view of Taiwan Normal University. The "normal" here means that it's a school for educating teachers. It started life as a school to produce teachers but has since grown to have a variety of departments and majors.
NTNU, or Shida as it's most commonly known, among foreigners is probably the most well known university. The biggest reason for this is because it has the most popular program for teaching chinese to foreigners. On top of that their textbooks for teaching chinese are the ones that most programs around the country use. They are the ones that I use as well (among others).
Because of the popularity of their program, foreigners come from around the world to learn chinese here. In turn this means that many foreigners live in this area. Which caused a wide variety of foreign food restaurants to spring up in the area. Also there are a quite a few lounges where foreigners hang out and taiwanese go to socialize with foreigners.
I think for any foreigner coming to taiwan, whether they are studying chinese here or not, the first place they come to spend time at is the Shida area, and then slowly as they feel more comfortable they branch out to other areas of the city. This is certainly how it worked for me, as I not only first stayed in a hostel here when I arrived, but my first apartment was also in the area.
The picture is from the rear building of the school looking down at the front two buildings. The campus includes some offices to the right, and the sports complex to the left. The rest of the campus is diagonally across the street. The orange building to the right of the photo is the library and the building behind that one is where the chinese learning classes are. Outside that one building is a good place for foreigner gazing. Some taiwanese who may be interested in looking at foreigners will go here and watch them coming in and out of their classes.
