Taipei: General Impressions

First of all, the week I was there was the beginning of Chinese New Year. This meant that there were fireworks everywhere. While landing at night in Taipei I saw quite a few fireworks. It was pretty neat seeing them explode at eyelevel all across the city. During the week we heard sporadic fireworks. I am not sure if Taipei had any organized fireworks show, but the locals set off plenty on their own. They would set them off at night and during the day and it didn't matter where they were. Back home I am sure setting off fireworks in the middle of the city with lots of people around would land you in jail pretty quickly. There were even kids running around shooting them off. No one seemed to mind. Things would be exploding the street and bystanders would keep on walking as if nothing was happening.

Secondly, there are no westerners. I didn't expect to see many, but I figured there would be at least some since the west does a lot of business with Taiwan. Out side of the hostel, I don't think we saw any. The locals took notice. They weren't as obvious as the Mainland Chinese in Shenzhen but we were paying enough attention to notice. While on the train ride back to Taipei, there was a Taiwanese who took a picture of me. She tried to do it discreetly but we saw my picture on her camera screen as she was proudly displaying it to her travel companions (I think family). Chase complained a lot that the locals gave me a lot more attention then him. Pierre didn't seem to care at all, but it was probably because I was the only one with curly hair and facial hair.

The food in Taiwan was also very good. Before I left, everyone who had been there before said the food was great, but I the food surpassed all of my expectations. Everywhere we went, from Taipei to the costal villages, the food was unique and cheap. They even had milk as a common drink. A bottle of Dr. Milker brand milk costs about US$0.75.

Another thing that stood out to me was the police presences. Having been in Mainland China only a few days before, the difference stood out even more. There were few cops and security guards. I only say one group of them bigger then two and they were directing traffic. We approached them to ask for directions and they were very friendly and helpful. They seemed to make it their mission to help us out. Westerners are rare in both Shenzhen and Taipei, but in Taipei the cops where much more accepting of foreigners whereas the Shenzhen cops seemed paranoid of us.

One odd thing I noticed was the placement of some buildings. Along paths there were a decent amount of abandoned (or looked abandoned) buildings. While walking up a mountain to a park in Keelung, the path went through a restaurant. As far as I could tell the restaurant had not name (there was nothing posted in English or Chinese) and the building looked like it may have been abandoned at one point. There was quite a bit of activity with a woman singing and a couple of chefs cooking things for the handful of patrons. You had to walk through this place to get to the top which was kind of odd. Then when we went on our hike we pasted many private homes (some more of shacks). We were no where near a named road, just people living out in the forest along a national park path (or what ever the Taiwanese equivalent is). I was interesting to see a society that was so backwards they didn't even have a mailing address.

The weather for the most part was somewhat depressing. I think we had one clear day. The forecast called for rain everyday that we were there, but fortunately it was only a real issue once. It typically rained at night or while we were on the bus.

And finally, I must note the sanitation. It was pretty bad. There was trash everywhere. Garbage bags were not put in a central location, they would just put it where ever on the street when ever they needed to. Sometimes they would just leave the bags in the elevator. The beach in Daili was just plain disgusting. All kinds of stuff washed up on the rocks and no one ever cleaned it. Some places look more like a landfill because the beach was not rocks or sand, it was just garbage. However, the drainage was pretty good. Despite all the rain, there were hardly any puddles and on the streets caught a whiff of sewage about as often as any major American city.

Overall, it was a very good trip. We saw a lot and experienced a lot that westerns don't. Taiwan is quite a unique place.

Taipei: Flight Home

We did not have much time on our final day in Taipei. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 8am so we got up around 5. We checked out of the hostel and went across the street to catch the bus to the airport. It was another long bus ride, about an hour. When we checked in at the airport they told us that the flight we were on was overbooked so they were offering us business class seats on a Cathy Pacific flight that left 25 minutes later. We decided to take it and they gave us an additional NTD200 to spend on food in the restaurant. This made us very happy because the extra 25 minutes gave us time to eat breakfast and since we had used up all our NTD, the extra 200 gave us enough to buy breakfast. We then boarded the Cathy Pacific Airbus 330 and found our seats. There was very few people in business class and the configuration of the plan had no first class. Cathy Pacific has been given service awards and it really showed. The treatment we got in business class for that hour and half flight was better then first class in the states. All the flight attendants memorized our names and always addressed us by our last name. We were given a selection of fresh food which was also very good. It wasn't long before we were back in Hong Kong. I got back to my room at about noon and spent the rest of the day resting.

Taipei: Day Four

This was our last full day in Taipei. We decided to spend it doing some miscellaneous things in the city that we were not able to do earlier. Unfortunately it was raining pretty hard so that limited what we could do. We first went down the street from our hostel to the Taipei Handicraft Market. It was actually more of a store that sold craft things relating to Taiwan and Chinese culture. It was mostly art and jewelry. After buying a few items we headed out to what is nicknamed "The Golf Ball Mall." (I don't remember the actual name, everyone there calls it The Golf Ball Mall). This was a very large mall that had a 10 story sphere on one side. Half of the sphere was on in the inside, half was outside. The stores inside were not anything unique but the architecture was. We got lunch in the mall and then headed back to our hostel for a while. We stayed there until dinner, which we decided to look for those famous soup dumplings (called xiao long bao). The restaurant that everyone recommended was Din Tai Fung. We showed up around 7pm and the place was packed. The restaurant was three stories high but very narrow. They gave us a number and told us it would be about an hour (we were 50 numbers away). We decided that was fine and looked at a menu to figure out what we wanted. While waiting an Italian man noticed us and started a conversation. We were the only Westerners there, which was probably why he was so excited. He said that he loved Din Tai Fung so much that he ate there everyday. He gave us recommendations on everything on the menu. He then introduced us to the owner, who has set up restaurants all over south Asia and has become a multimillionaire from his soup dumplings. He didn't speak much English but he was very nice. As soon as this happened we some how got a table despite having over 20 more numbers to go. Inside the restaurant was pretty nice. It wasn't over the top fancy but it was just a nice Chinese restaurant. The waitresses were very well trained, doing most everything for us in a very perfect form. They then started bringing out our orders. We got one order of pork, one of vegetable, one of pork and crab, all with soup in them. Additionally we had an order of pork and fried rice. Each dumpling order had probably around 8 dumplings. We also got a free order of spicy shrimp. When it was delivered we just looked at it and asked "Did we order that?" The waitress just said "It is free," bowed, and walked away. At this point we were all very confused but then a different waitress can over and explained that it is a new dish and they want feed back. After we had finished it, the owner came back with another waitress who asked how we liked it. We told her we really liked it and the owner seemed very pleased (he didn't say anything while at our table, but just smiled). There is no other way to eat xiao long bao then with chop sticks. They are relatively small dumplings so I could eat them in one bit, but barely. You pick them up with the chop sticks and then dip it in sauce (1 part soy, 3 parts vinegar, and some strands of ginger). You then hold a soup spoon under the dumpling when you bit into it so you can catch the soup that falls out. The xiao long bao (with pork) was probably the best meal I had ever had. There are no words to describe it. For desert we had these little dumplings filled with sesame. As odd as it may sound, it tasted just like chocolate. For all that amazing food our bill turned out to be about US$10. Afterwards we looked for a jade market, but it was not open that night. We headed off to bed since it was starting to get late and we had to get up the next morning really early to catch our flight.

Taipei: Day Three

The third day in Taiwan we set completely aside for a long hike. Just east of Taipei are lots of trails. The one we picked to do was from Fulong to Daili which was about 10km long. We woke up early (8am) to get a quick breakfast and head out on the train. The train ride was about an hour and half and there were no seats left. The train, unlike the metro system, was not designed to have people stand. There were no bars to hold on to, we just stood in the isles. The train was packed with lots of other people also standing. Needless to say, it was a long train ride. The scenery did make up for it as most of the train ride followed a river out in the country side. When we got to Fulong we immediately started looking for the beach. Fulong was pretty small (one road) but had lots of people visiting due to the popular beach. We never figured out how to get to the beach but we kept seeing it while standing behind a fence. We really were more interested in finding food. We stopped in the visitors' center hoping to find a café but the only food they served was expensive desert (and oddly enough "Fried Toast"). We talked to the equivalent of a park ranger who was very helpful in showing us where we could hike and how to get to the trail head. We were given about 5 different maps all with different details and none of which were in English. We then walked down the one and only road in Fulong to look for food. We picked a small family restaurant and had the most amazing fried rice with pork. I got what I thought was just apple juice that turned out to my surprise to be sparkling. I was excited about it but Pierre thought I was crazy (it must be common in France). After paying for the meal (it came out to be about US$3) we started to walk the trail. The trail started off nicely paved with white lines drawn on both sides. It didn't take long for us to get into rural Taiwan. We saw lots of farms and run down shacks. There were not too many locals outside, but the one old lady we did pass eating a bowl of rice on her porch did seem friendly. As soon as we started going up the hill we saw the layered rice patties (I am assuming they were for rice, but nothing was growing in any of them at the time) along the hillside. The paved path then ended in what we first believed to be a dead end. It just became some ones parking area adjacent to a house with a wall then cliff. Thinking we missed a turn we walked back to the next intersection. There it seemed clear that the direction we were originally going was the correct one. So we turned around and went back the same direction again. We investigated the area around the dead end for a while until figuring out that what we thought was the gravel path to a different house nearby, was actually the path. The path literally went through some ones front yard. From there it started to become forest. I would describe it as semi-tropical and dense. The path then became a road as it passed a park. This park had rice patties separated by stone walls on flat ground. We didn't stay too long as there were lots of people. The trail then followed a stream which had waterfall after waterfall. At one point the stream joined another stream, both having a waterfall at the joint. The path left the river at a set of stairs. These stairs were really steep and went up quite a ways. There was easily a thousand steps which we had to take a break part of the way up. We passed a stone inscription. Apparently the popular thing for ancient Chinese generals to do was to inscribe things on rocks in hard to reach places. At the top of the climb the forest ended and the scene looked like a hilly meadow. Where the path starts to descend again was an observation point that overlooked the small ocean side village of Daili. After spending some time resting and looking out over the ocean we began the decent which took a lot longer then we had expected. The path cuts back and forth all the way down the mountain side. At the bottom was the ruins of an ancient inn that didn't look like much other then two squares of stone, but it was interesting. The trail ended in Daili at a temple. We didn't look at the temple since we had spent some much time at several the other day and this one didn't look that unique. In stead we went to the beach front. It was mostly stone and very very polluted. Trash was everywhere. We then got on the train back to Taipei. The train station was incredibly small and the train wasn't that big either. It was a long train ride home (I think about 2 hours but we were stuck at one station for a while). We were so exhausted we got some pizza and went to bed.

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Taipei: Day Two

On the second full day in Taiwan we decided to go to one of the outlying cities, Keelung. We went to the train station, which was conveniently located across the street from our hostel, to figure out how the train system works. The station was pretty simple but had a sense of grandeur at the same time. The board displaying the train times seemed out dated as panels flipped rapidly to change information. We eventually bought our tickets and went to the platform to wait for our train. All the platforms were underground, and after our train left we were still underground for quite some time. When we emerged, we were in a much more rural part of Taiwan. I saw shacks with small vegetable gardens around them and lots of other rural poverty. Probably the strangest thing I saw was a half completed high rise that seemed abandoned for some time. Surrounding the building was shacks and lots of vegetation. The exposed steel framework looked rusted and it was clear construction stopped long ago. We reached Keelung after a little more then an hour train ride. Keelung is a shipping port on the northern tip of Taiwan. It seemed small for a city but there was plenty of activity. We wondered around for a bit. We went through a very crowed street market that sold mostly food. A scoop of snails or a tentacle on a stick were common items sold. We then went to lunch at a very small local restaurant. None of them spoke English and there was no menu so it took some creative communication methods to order. After trying to talk to each other in our native languages we ended up going to another patrons table and pointing at what we wanted. We each got a bowl of rice with minced meat (I'm fairly certain it was pork). It was NT20 each which is about US$0.60. It was very good. We then headed up the hill to a park that overlooked Keelung. It was an interesting view but nothing sensational. We didn't stay too long before deciding to try to go to the limestone cape in Yeliu. We had no idea how to get to Yeliu. We assumed by bus but all the bus schedules were in Chinese. After spending some time trying to figure it out we eventually just got on a bus that had a destination in English written on it that seemed close to Yeliu. The driver didn't speak English either so we looked at a map posted in the bus. That map was also not English so we tried to match it up with ours which was in a language we could read. We didn't make any progress as the map posted didn't have enough features for us to identify where we were going. Fortunately there was a woman on the bus who spoke English and recognized our problem. She told us that we got on the right bus and then told the driver to alert us when we got to the Yeliu stop. The bus traveled through the country side and stopped at all kinds on little towns. I wondered what it would be like if buses ran regularly through the country side in Ohio. It was about an hour before the bus driver started shouting to use in Mandarin that this was where we wanted to get off. Yeliu is a small harbor village. It only had a couple of streets but they were long and followed the shore line. It took us a little time to figure out how to get to the limestone cape. It's official name is the Yeliu Geological National Park. There was a long building that was a market we walked through. It turned out that was a mistake. It was a lot longer then it looked, poorly ventilated, smelled like fish, and at the end was the exit to the park. So we walked back around the building and found then entrance and paid the small fee it get in. Inside there were a ton of people walking around the strange limestone formation. The limestone formations are rather hard to explain. They seemed like giant mushrooms. I wondered around a bit looking for places there were not a lot of people and just generally relaxing by the ocean side. We stayed until dark at which point we walked back to the bus stop to figure out if there was a way to go straight from where we were to Taipei. The few signs were in Chinese so that didn't help. I managed to find an Indian man how spoke English and he seemed pretty confident that where he was standing was where the bus to Taipei stops. It wasn't long before a bus came but it was too full for Chase, Pierre and I to all go. We waited about 10 minutes before two buses came at once for Taipei which we had no problem getting on. It rained the whole way back to Taipei and took well over an hour. The bus stop we got off at was right by our hostel and we ate a quick dinner at Burger King since it was so late and then went to bed for the night.

Album:

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(second half)

Taipei: Day One

We spent the first day in Taipei visiting obvious attractions. Our first stop was the Guandu Temple, which was on the outskirts of the city. We took the MRT train to the Guandu stop. Once we got there we really had no idea which way to go since the signs were not very good, so we just started following the mass of locals that were heading in one direction. We went through some windy narrow roads with run down buildings. There were festive decorations all around for Chinese New Year and some little street vendors trying to sell stuff to the people walking by. One lady sold some ice tea to Chase. She spoke almost perfect English which seemed out of place. We eventually made it to the temple which was tucked away among all of the other buildings. The Guandu Temple was quite large. It wasn't scaled up, it just sprawled. There were all kinds of little buildings, shines, and hallways that seemed thrown together. It was very ornately decorated and was very complex. There was a path through the temple that you are suppose to take but we kept getting lost so we gave up doing it the proper way. There were also too many people there for us to really see where we were suppose to go. It was still the Chinese New Year so there were a lot of praying and offerings. The temple itself was actually on the side of a mountain. On top was a garden area and underneath were caves that lead to more shrines. After a while it got overwhelming and we decided to go some where else. We wondered to the nearby market but didn't see anything of interested so we walked along a river which we thought would led us back to the MRT station. It took us a while but with the help of a couple of police officers directing traffic we got back to where we wanted to be. The next stop was the Taipei Confucius Temple, which is modeled after the temple in Confucius' home town. There was significantly less activity at this temple. It was more spread out with lots of little gardens segregated by walls and gateways. It was very peaceful and enjoyable. We went across the street to get lunch at a bakery. The food was very good. I had a large round piece of bread with slices of meat on it and glazed. It was sort of like a cold glazed pizza. I also had a piece of what could best be described as chocolate cake, which was also very good. We looked at another temple next door but it was not that unique and very busy with Chinese New Year activities. We then headed back to the MRT to go visit Taipei 101. Taipei 101 is the tallest building in the world (the Burj Dubai will beat it soon). It is suppose to represent a giant bamboo sticking out of the city. The eight section are for good luck (8 is a lucky number). There was nothing of real significances near Taipei 101. Like the rest of the city, everything is spread out and there is no center of anything. Just outside the door was a market, but I am assuming it was just for New Years. Inside was a huge upscale mall. It took us a while going up and down many escalators to find where you buy a ticket to go to the observation deck. We had to wait in line and go through light security to get into the elevator. This elevator is the fastest in the world. We went up 84 stories in 32 seconds. Unfortunately it was a cloudy day so we couldn't see much, but you could definitely tell you were very high up. With no other skyscrapers near by, it was hard to imagine you were still in a building. The observation level was two floors. The outside walls were all windows but everything else was jewelry for sale. After a while it got dark so we decided to go back down. We went to go have dinner at a restaurant known for its soup dumplings (it is dumplings with soup in them), but it was closed so we wondered around for a small local place. We found one where the workers didn't know any English, but the menu had pictures and enough English words to understand what animal the meat was coming from. It was very good. We then started heading back to our hostel. On the way we pasted the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial. It was really awesome at night. The grounds were spread out and surrounded by a wall. The monument in the center was a giant white building that was light up. Visually it was very beautiful.
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Made it to Taipei

I have found a computer with internet connection in my hostel. I doubt I will have another post while in Taipei but at least I can get some stuff down before I forget. Pictures will come when I return in Hong Kong. I will also spell check when I get back.

So my flight out of Hong Kong was in the early evening at 6:15 on Dragon Air. I am traveling with Chase and Pierre. The flight was only an hour and 15 minutes but they made it very nice. It was a large Airbus 330 and they served dinner (chicken and rice, it was very good). We arrived in Taipei and got through customs and immigration with no problem. Taipei International Airport is not very big and seems a little behind the times. We managed to find the bus service that would take us into the city near where our hostel was. The bus ride was about 45 minutes long. During the ride we realized that the city is very spread out. There is no cluster of major buildings like most other major cities I have visited. There were decently high buildings everywhere with an occasionally tall building sticking out in seemingly random places. Once we got to the bus stop it was not that difficult to find our hostel, The Holo Family Taipei Traveler's Hostel. To check in we had to go to the 22nd floor of the building. The building it is in is perhaps 25-30 floors with all kinds of other businesses and apartments. The hostel itself is scattered throughout 10 floors. Due to room constrictions we managed to get a really good deal. Our room is a lot like a lower end hotel. We have it to ourselves with two beds and a private bath. The owner of the hostel (I'm guessing Mr. Holo?) is quite an interesting character. He is so calm and relaxed. He calmly clapped when we first arrived and then did it again the next day when we booked the room again. He had forgot who we were and thought we had just arrived. We had to show him the receipt from the night before to show we were here and he was shocked when he found his signature. He often tells us strange things too. He told Chase today while rebooking that he need to put his luggage aside to get the room again. The request didn't make any sense and a woman (his wife?) told us just to ignore him.

Since we arrived somewhat late, we just walked around a couple of blocks. Taipei seems a lot different then Hong Kong. There are some main streets, but most are smaller and pedestrians wonder around in them a lot. Traffic laws are interpreted creatively. On the first night we watched a van run a red light by honking and waving his hand at opposing traffic. In Hong Kong there is very little if any honking. Here is really common. Some road seem like alleys but will have a random 7-11 store in the middle that is open late at night. We then went back to the room to figure out what we wanted to do for the next day