Taipei, April 17th

We arrived in Taiwan yesterday morning. Our flight to Taipei left from Honolulu, Oahu at 1am on the 16th, so we flew from Maui to Oahu early on the 15th so we could have a look around Honolulu. Since we crossed the international dateline it is one day ahead so we arrived on the 17th. We were both pretty tired after a long day in Honolulu followed by a long flight to Taiwan.

Taipei Day 1

Hawaii was nice, but it is still the U.S., I consider that our world travel starts with this leg. We took a bus from the airport with the plan of transferring to the subway to get to our destination. The first thing I noticed was all the scooters. There are more scooters than cars and they drive very close to each other. It is a little like bicycles in Amsterdam, but the scooters mingle with cars and weave around the larger vehicles all the time.

We missed our bus stop, and ended up taking a taxi to get to our living place. Yanmei asked several before finding one who knew the address we had. She learned that from the Amazing Race, always find a taxi who knows where you want to go :). It also helps that she speaks Mandarin.

We're staying at a place we found on AirBnb, it is a spare room in an apartment. The couple renting to us are Canadian (wife) and Dutch (husband). Although it is near a busy street, it is down an alley so it is surprisingly quiet. Here is a picture of Yanmei at the entrance.

We had naps and changed into clean clothes (we'd been wearing the same clothes since Maui), then went to meet Amanda, a friend of Yanmei's that she met in the UK. We took the subway to get there. The Taipei subway (MRT) seems very good. The stations are announced in four languages one of which is English, so I could find my way around even if I didn't have Yanmei to translate. It's busy but not extremely crowded like the Beijing subway. Also the price is good only about $0.65 per ride.

Amanda works at the Mandarin Training Center.

Amanda showed us around the MTC for a while, then we started to head back to our room while looking in a few shops. Yanmei is looking for a hat. I told she has to get a good one before Egypt because she will need it then.

We got off the subway one stop early to visit the Shilin Night Market, although it wasn't quite dark yet.

Picture of a stand where Yanmei bought some fruit. The free samples were delicious, but the actual fruit we got wasn't as good. I think we could have bargained for a better price too.

We got back to our room and retired early to try to adjust.