Taiwan Trip, Day 1

Last year I decided to go to Taiwan for Christmas. I have always been interested in China, but was too afraid of the actual mainland China to go there by myself. I wanted somewhere relatively nearby and inexpensive, and Taiwan fit the bill. In addition, the National Palace Museum in Taipei has an extraordinary collection of Chinese art, most of it "liberated" from the Communists and the vast majority of Chinese people by the fleeing Kuomintan government. Regardless of my feelings about that, the Taiwanese have done an excellent job is preserving it and no doubt protecting it from the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. I really wanted to visit the museum. Thus I bought my tickets for Taiwan and resolved to spend my Christmas and New Year's enjoying myself and doing weird new things instead of feeling homesick and sorry for myself.

I was really impressed by Taiwan! It is not exactly a popular destination, many people doing layovers if anything, but I think it is severely under-rated. It is inexpensive, but definitely a first-world country--it is fairly exotic and still unused to foreigners, especially in the south, but completely safe and with a fair number of very helpful English speakers. The places I went were beautiful, and the people unfailingly kind and helpful to a single female traveler.

With all that in mind, I set off for Taiwan. I arrived fairly late and took the bus into town. I decided to stay at the World Scholar House, an inexpensive hostel that had generally received positive reviews. It was on the top floor of a back street in Taipei. While the hostel was generally a nice place, it was unfortunately a bad time for the hostel, I think. I'm pretty sure the beds had bedbugs (they were soon after fumigated) and the bathrooms were dirty. I heard that the owner had made the always unfortunate decision of leaving the hostel in the hands of a long-term guest while she went on vacation somewhere and he had let it go to shit. Whether this was true or not, I could not in all fairness recommend this hostel. Also, the beds were really hard and it was full of mosquitoes. It may have improved since, however. The location was fairly nice and there was a Starbucks and a number of nice coffee shops nearby. A number of the people staying there are long-termers--English teachers and what not. Generally people are very friendly and there is a nice lounge area to meet people in, so it is definitely not all bad!

The first thing I noticed was just how hot it was in Taiwan. It was quite a bit more hot and humid than I had expected, considering it was winter time. The first day was especially warm. I felt just fine in only a t-shirt. Unfortunately, it also started to rain that day and much of the day was spent under an umbrella. I still had fun, though!

I woke up and headed to a Starbucks. This was the start of my sweet sweet romance with Starbucks coffee—believe it or not, I had never before really tried coffee from Starbucks. But at this one, a peppermint latte looked extremely delicious and I had to try it out. That was it—I was addicted! I was also pleasantly surprised by the girl who worked at the counter, as her English was excellent.

My destination for my first day in Taiwan was the Wanhua area, one of the more traditional parts of Taipei. Although there is very little in the way of ancient buildings or whatnot in Taiwan, some of the city still retains a distinctively rustic feeling. This was definitely true of the enjoyable Wanhua area. In order to get there, I took the excellent metro system. It is extremely cheap, very reliable, and clean. The way you pay is pretty cool. When you buy a ticket, you get a little plastic coin thing. When you enter the gates, you just run it over the sensor, like a SUICA card or something in Japan. When you exit, you deposit it in the gate and it lets you out. Just like in Japan, the amount that the ticket costs depends on how far you travel. If you make a mistake about how much your journey will cost, you can pay extra before you leave the station.



My first stop was the well-known Longshan Temple. It is dedicated to the goddess of mercy—Kannon in Japan, Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit, and Guanyin in Chinese. I bought an adorable key-strap clay figure of Guanyin… so cute and so sacrilegious! I love it! My first impression of Longshan was of bright color and chaos. It is a big cliché, but it was really so different from a Japanese temple! The sheer magnitude of the decorations was amazing. People were everywhere, making offerings, telling their fortunes, praying, and so on.



Longshan definitely has a lot of character, and the carvings are wonderfully ornate and colorful. I really enjoyed it, and spent a lot of time looking around.



After that, I wandered around the Wanhua area a little bit. Things were dirtier and older looking than Japan—that was undeniable—but it was so full of life and character that walking around was a lot of fun.



I peeked down a tiny lane full of fortune tellers and went to an underground market full of souvenir shops. I looked at various religious souvenirs and bought some paper art depicting a Chinese folk god. I looked with lust at some of the incredibly delicious looking cakes in the shops surrounding the temple area. I walked down an indoors covered market that was full of vegetables, strange herbs, and chicken feet. It sometimes smelled terrible and was not very appetizing, but it was fascinating. I also wandered down the `Snake Alley,` but didn’t see any snakes, and wasn’t that excited by it. I think it was the wrong time of day for excitement at Snake Alley. I visited another random temple along the side of the streets and found some cheap clothing stores in back alleys. There was an awesome little restaurant full of old men that was located in a shack under what looked like a banyan tree—it was growing over the shack until it was a part of it. Very cool stuff.



I even saw another temple wedged into a bunch of gray apartment blocks.

Unfortunately, this was also the day that I discovered something that was to haunt the rest of my Taiwanese trip—I am a big wussy. Many Taiwanese restaurants have no English language menus, and many of them are just some tables on the sidewalk with unfriendly looking proprietors. I ended up having lunch at Yoshinoya! Yes, they have them in Taiwan. It was tasty, but basically just Japanese food. Ah well. Again, the clerk at Yoshinoya was both cute and brave—he also attempted to speak in English. Which is just as well, since I do not know a single word of Mandarin or Taiwanese.

I thought that was enough for my first day, and went back to the youth hostel. I had several conversations with a pleasant enough bunch of English teachers and other various long term people.