Taipei

Originally, I was hoping to write a little post every day during my travels, but looks like that’s not happening! If you’ve read my earlier post, you know that I’ve made it to Japan. Since I didn’t post anything from Taipei, though, here are some snippets of the city.

Little Observations

Taipei reminds me a lot of Japan. It’s a big city on a small, East Asian island nation. But there are also obvious differences. For example, the characters are all Chinese characters, rather than the mix of characters/kana in Japan. The temples and older architecture (aka not the high rise buildings) are also of a different style than the ones in Japan.

One of the first things I noticed on my taxi ride to the hotel was the numerous flashing red lights around the construction zones. The garbage trucks sound Beethoven’s Für Elise over its speakers (a version that sounds like those toys that are losing battery juice, lol).

I only had time to visit one night market (we were planning on two, but got too tired), and ended up visiting the super big one, Shilin. It was a little overwhelming because we didn’t really have a map or look too much in detail. Thanks to YouTube, I remembered that this was the market with the underground food “court” area with a bunch of night market foods lined up. After making one trip around the underground food court, we picked a spot and sat down to order an oyster omelet, Taiwanese beef noodles, shrimp fried rice, spicy wontons, pork over rice. I was hoping to get stinky tofu, but I didn’t have any room in my stomach. It’s definitely not as stinky as it’s hyped up to be. I kind of thought the stinky tofu smelled like canned bamboo shoot liquid, although a little fermented. It’s definitely not a smell I want to, like, live with constantly in my room or anything. But it’s definitely not a lethal smell. One thing I did try and did not like too much was the Aiyu jelly drink. I loved the jelly, but the drink itself was kind of like limeade, and since I don’t like lime… lol.

The metro is super convenient and super cheap. We rode on the airport expressway twice, and went around the city using the metro probably about 8 times and we only used about 10 dollars each.

There are a lot of motor scooters. Don’t get run over. The TRAFFIC PEDESTRIAN SIGNALS ARE THE BOMB DOT COM. I’m a little obsessed with the cute little Ampelmanns in Berlin, but I think the Taipei green stick figures are my new favorite. They move!!

The toilet paper sheets are longer than the regular ones in the US.

There’s so many things, so instead of listing them all, here’s a video with snippets from Taipei 🙂 It’s not edited super well, but I’m short for time and don’t want to spend my time in Japan editing videos 😉

*Note: I’m giggling around 1:18 because I’m super pleased that the metro machine made the sound that I like when I scanned my card. I’m not sure why it rings sometimes and not other times. So.