The Return to and (Eventual) Exit from Taipei

I decided to try a different hostel than before. Motivation one, was my curiosity of what other hostels were like in Taipei; motivation two, was I wanted a more central location; and motivation three, I had heard a few good recommendations for this particular place, Eight Elephants Hostel. Upon entering the hostel, there was a slight theory of the business model of this place (that would later be corroborated by others). Hire only females and make sure they are attractive ones. There were four people working, and they all fell into this category. Anyway, the place was pretty lively and an invitation was immediately extended for Friday night festivities. I'll fast forward since there isn't anything terribly exciting except going to an all you can drink bar, me subluxating my shoulder, witnessing a fight between an expat and a Taiwanese guy and then having the misfortune of still being around when the police showed up, all capped by an eventual 7am bedtime and an Egg McMuffin!

I slept in late on Saturday but was completely fine with it, the week had caught up to me. I had evening plans to meet up with Debbie (from my first day in Taiwan) to get a feel for the nightlife like the Taiwanese do it! We met up at Ximending (the trendy bustling area mentioned in an earlier post), and as soon as I exited the subway, I was greeted by Debbie with a bubble tea in hand for me, so nice! We grabbed some famous noodles (that weren't anything to write home about), walked around, then stopped at a giant courtyard of outdoor seating for various establishments. It was a very lively atmosphere and they also had BOGO drinks! We decided to continue exploring and headed to the nightlife area of City Hall where I was able to witness some of Taiwan's finest folks entering and exiting the place. No attempt was made on our part since I was sporting the sneakers! We hopped for a bit, but finally got comfortable at Roxy Roots listening to live music, having a few, and eating again! I didn't want a late night, since I had to catch my 1pm flight the next day. Fast forward again, heading to the airport on Sunday when I realize my flight is not 1pm, but 1am. No matter, I think to myself, I'll just be 12 hours early, I'll kill the time in the airport. Quickly I realize that 1am actually means I've already missed my flight by 12 hours. So while I was jamming to the tunes at Roxy Roots, my plane took off, without me, oops!

I was already on the bus to the airport when I realized this, but figured I'd just talk to the ticket counter when I got there. However, low cost airlines, don't really have ticket agents and everything has to be conducted by phone. Thank God for Skype and free wifi, otherwise how else could I easily and, relatively, cheaply make a call to the Philippines! Anyway, if I wanted to fly that night it was going to cost me over $200, but if I waited two days, I could fly for $90. What a great opportunity for me to see more of what I haven't seen, is what I told myself! I decided to change hostels again since I was too embarrassed to say hello to everyone that I had just said goodbye to. I did learn some interesting stories about Eight Elephants that would be worth sharing sometime. Nothing bad but kind of interesting!

The Cats Pajamas was the next hostel I decided to try. When I arrived, I ran into some Spanish friends that I knew from Manila, truly a small world! They were catching the return flight that night (or actually morning), but they invited me tag along on their random shenanigans. Those guys truly kept me entertained, as soon as we all finished lunch, all (and I mean all) of them were looking for a bakery to get some desserts. Once they found desserts, they did not hesitate to dig into each other's choices without asking. I thought that was kind of cool. Once dessert was finished, they were looking for a coffee shop. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how they got to see any of Taipei. Eventually, we all returned to back to the hostel, they packed their stuff up to get ready to leave, while I watched some of the guests and staff sing karaoke. I didn't know this, but you can turn any computer into a karaoke machine with only a microphone. The program needed is called UltraStar and in addition to providing lyrics, it shows you where your pitch needs to fall as you sing. One thing I noticed throughout my time in Taiwan is how many young expats are able to speak Mandarin like nobody's business. It's quite a sight to see, and is always refreshing to see that westerners are so willing and able to learn a complex language like Mandarin!

The next day I just took a stroll by one of the major rivers of Taipei with a bubble tea in one hand and a couple dumplings in the other. I had just remembered that my phone can be used as a radio, so I listened, walked, sipped, chomped then chomped, sipped, walked, listened then repeated, for a good part of the day. Oh yeah, I also almost stepped on a snake!

Determined not to miss my early morning flight to Manila again, I got back to the hostel swatted a few mosquitoes with an electric racket/swatter (a very unique experience), swapped a few stories with a Thai girl and a couple Canadian guys, then headed for the airport around 9pm--a good 4.5 hours before my flight would take off! I arrived to my apartment in Manila close to 4am, but not before walking by another 7/11. This time I gave it a miss!

Taipei Exploring Continued

(by popular demand, this will hopefully be my last long winded post as I will attempt to shorten them significantly and focus on the highlights. Man, I'm doing it again, I'm rambling on in my disclaimer that my future posts will hopefully be shorter. Keep your fingers crossed for me please)

My second full day in Taipei, Sunday, I decided to tackle on my own. After waking up a bit late but sleeping better than the previous night, a little factoid I didn’t share was the people who were sharing the room with me the first night had stinky clothes and bags or perhaps feet. Quite frankly, I’m not at liberty to discuss where they were from since I don’t want to generalize about Swedish people, but they were nice folks, haha! In any case, they were NOT there the second night and I was relieved. I first headed to the CKS Memorial via MRT. It’s a giant square courtyard with a few buildings where kids practice their hip hop dancing and families just stroll and sit. The memorial building itself houses a giant statue of CKS himself and the ground floor has lots of pictures and his two bulletproof Cadillac limos he used. The design of the courtyard and the buildings were quite awesome, but overly nothing too mind blowing. I did enjoy sitting and people watching, though! From there I intended to walk to Longshan temple but a nice fellow who noticed I was trying to get my bearings (with a map, thank you) advised me against it. Back on the MRT I went and decided to postpone Longshan Temple and head to trendy Ximending which was on the way and is where the “young and trendy folks” hang out.

Ximending proved to be exactly what I had imagined. Lots of stores, food establishments, high end shops, tattoo parlors, and other things you’d expect in the trendy part of town. I walked the full bit of it, observed a concert, found a nice outdoor patio area, and then decided to walk to Longshan Temple. Now it really wasn’t that far of a walk BUT the signs weren’t very clear so it took me three requests for directions and multiple looks on my map and a bit over an hour to get there but I finally did. The temple was having a special festival where they were giving out free oolong tea which was amazingly awesome. The temple, in the middle of the city, managed to have a few waterfalls that pleasantly fell into the ponds below them. It was a welcome escape from the hustle of the city, but only vehicle hustle as there were loads of people walking all about. I paid my respects to the gazillion statues and dodged the fiery flames of people holding incense sticks by the fistful and proceeded to head to Snake Alley down the way. I did have to make a brief stop for a girl playing music on a saw, quite neat, oh yeah stopped for a dumpling as well, delicious, oh yeah, and a sugarcane juice, also yummy!

Snake Alley, which apparently has gone down in popularity the past few years, is a street where they are known to dramatically kill snakes and other animals. I wasn’t really keen on seeing this but figured I should at least pass through. Fortunately, they don’t start the “show” until 7pm and I arrived shortly before that. I did see some disturbing sights including live snakes piled into solariums ready to be killed and live turtles that have been removed from their shells. That pretty much made me want to leave and I did. I decided to walk around the other part of the market a bit to get my mind off of the ghastly scenes. I contemplated getting a foot massage but thought I might be too relaxed to get home after one. Instead I perused sunglasses, belts, and other knickknacks till I found another dumpling stand. I ordered and the lady kept pointing and saying something but I couldn’t figure it out until after I left. She was trying to ask me what priced dumpling did I want. Oh well, it was still delicious and energized me for my trip home. When I got back to the hostel, my horror as who was back but one of the “stinky folks” and he was staying in my room again. I had to leave so I went to a teppenyaki place which is the Japanese style where they cook in front of you for some lamb, soup, veggies, rice, and unlimited coke that I don’t drink. Sleep followed . . . in the stinky room!

First Days in Taiwan

Though I’ve skipped a boatload of updates from Korea and the Philippines in my sporadic blog updates I wanted to write about my trip to Taiwan before I forgot too many details about it. To start out with, it’s my new favorite place. It's the type of place that renewed my travel energy, much the same way Japan started my travel bug. Korea and the Philippines are also great, but they took a bit of time to grow on me; Taiwan, not so much! I knew I wanted to visit there, but didn’t think the trip would be so soon. Basically, while in the Philippines, I needed to pay about $70 to extend my visa. I’m a bit bitter about that since it’s pretty much a scheme to collect money. You get 21 free days when you arrive then need to pay $70 dollars to give you another 38 days then another $70 for another 59 days. In any case, I figured I should just take a trip to another country for a “few more” dollars instead. Looking at Cebu Pacific Air (a Philippine low cost airline) I checked the prices of Singapore, Kuala Lumpor, Thailand, and a couple other countries that aren’t coming to my head right now. China and Vietnam were out for this round since I only noticed my visa was about to expire about five days before the actual date which didn’t give me enough time to secure a visa for those countries. A trip to Taipei proved to be the cheapest at the last minute with a RT ticket running about $215. The crazy part about it is if I had planned even more in advance I could’ve gotten a RT ticket for about $50 to $60 (gotta be lucky for those ones) or for $120 if I had a bit more time. I gave myself “9 days” in Taiwan and you’ll soon learn why the 9 is in quotes.

My flight took off from MNL around 10:40pm on Friday, April 09, 2010 and arrived around midnight early Saturday morning. Unfortunately, there was no bus service at this time but surprisingly my lack of planning self did have foresight and talked to the hostel owner where I was going to be staying and she reserved a hired car for me. The hour trip to JV’s Hostel in Taipei took about an hour and cost me 900NTD or about $30. Obviously, I associate this cost with my airline ticket since if I arrived earlier I could’ve taken a bus. So now the price of my flight just went up from $215 to $245, haha, I’m so Indian! Everyone was still up or out when I arrived so I got the quick tour, chatted it up with the other hostel folks, and called it a night around 3:30am.

I had posted a thread in the Taipei Couchsurfing forum a few days earlier asking if anyone had suggestions of things to do while I was in Taiwan. A girl posted a response and suggested I go to Danshui, a town about 40 minutes or so north by public transportation, to meet up on a photography walk. Even though I’m not amazing at photography, I had no plans so I said why not. It ended up being a group of three people and me, two Taiwanese girls, Jessica and Debbie, and a guy from the UK, Nick. Everyone was so nice and welcoming. We sort of casually strolled around the town, stopped by a few sites, and even managed time to scale a rock climbing wall. Jessica suggested I try a-gi and bought a bowl for me. I’m not sure how to really describe it except that it’s a steamed/fried tofu ball with glass noodles inside served in a broth and a spicy sauce and that it was quite delicious! We had some tea at a lovely tea stall then did some more walking around.

Sort of lost track of time and Jessica wanted to show me Fisherman’s Wharf and its lovely sunset but had run out of time due to a prior engagement. Here’s the crazy nice part, because she wasn’t able to, she volunteered her other friend, Debbie, to show it to me instead. In any case, we didn’t actually make the wharf from a mixture of running out of time, it being kind of far, and us getting lost, however, we did catch the sunset along the river nonetheless. Heading back to the MRT, we walked through the food street, and Debbie suggested I try taro covered durian and mountain bubble tea. The former was interesting (if you don’t know what durian is, it’s the “stinky” fruit) and good, and the latter was awesome, tea made with edible seeds from some tree. We both decided to take the MRT back to the city center but on our way we had an impulse decision to head to the famous Shilin Night Market for even more food, because you KNOW I love to eat . . . and I eat a lot . . . and I can’t stop . . . and I have a problem :( kidding, kidding. So we actually got a bit lost again, but it really wasn’t our fault since we got off at the Shilin MRT spot BUT the market is actually the stop after it with a name not even similar to Shilin (further in our defense, the market has moved over the past few years), honestly I don’t get lost much, well not THAT much, but sometimes, from time to time, I like maps and how does a guy that likes maps get lost? If you do figure that out, let me know please! The night market was a smorgasbord of food but we only settled for an oyster omelet, a couple of sausages where the ‘bun’ was made out of seasoned rice, a couple juices made with bitter melon (good for the blood), and a giant chicken fritter. After our meal we had just enough will in us to ‘roll’ around the streets and visit the other aspects of the night market with everything from a giant pet market, clothing market, carnival games, bowling, the list goes on and on. We finally got ourselves on the MRT, headed back into the city, and called it a night! I am not sure I could’ve navigated my way as functionally around the market without Debbie. The niceness of Taiwanese peoples, so thanks Jessica, Debbie, and Nick!

As usual, pictures are (or will be) on my Facebook account!