Taiwan

Taiwan was kind of a surprise port since we couldn’t go to Japan anymore. Since no one knew anything about it really and I had pretty much all of my field work done for my classes, I didn’t even bother to make plans for my time there except to visit the National Palace Museum and the Taipei 101. I’ve also been sick of group travel for quite a while now so I was really hoping to be able to travel on my own or with just one or two other people. I kept avoiding people when they invited me to do things with them but eventually agreed to spend the first day with Alex and Steven because they planned to stay in Keelung that day and a bunch of our friends were planning to go to Taipei to spend the night there. Somehow that turned into being a group of 9 people trying to walk around together the first day. After a misadventure with an ATM and following our ridiculous line of people to the upstairs of food market, I decided I’d had enough and that I was ditching my group. My friend Russ ended up coming with me. We were both not thrilled with the whole group thing. We tried another ATM and it didn’t work either so we thought we were going to have to go back to the ship to exchange money but we tried one more time and found one that worked so then we had money. Then we decided there wasn’t really anything to do in Keelung so we would go to Taipei after all. Then we couldn’t find the train station or figure out how to buy tickets for the bus. So we once again thought we were going to have to go back to the ship. Right after we started walking back to the ship though we finally saw a sign with English translation that pointed to the train station so we followed the signs there and bought tickets to Taipei. The train ride was about 50 minutes. When we got there we took a taxi to the National Palace Museum which is where there is a bunch of stolen art from China that some guy (I’m bad at history) brought over thinking he was saving it from communists. Sounds exciting, right? The museum was a little disappointing but there was some pretty artwork.

After an hour or two we were bored and hungry so we decided to find somewhere to eat. The museum was away from pretty much everything else in the city so we hopped on a random bus that we had no idea where it was going and got off at a stop that looked like it had a lot of stores and maybe places to eat. It was fun (not) trying to figure out how much we were supposed to pay. The driver finally told us to just go because he was frustrated too. Oh, I forgot to mention it was super cold in Taiwan. Well, compared to most of the places we’ve been. Especially since we were told it would be hot because it’s on the Tropic of Cancer. But no. It was cold and rainy and all of my warm clothes were (and still are) in the laundry from my Beijing trip so I was wearing shorts and a thin shirt. I at least had my rain coat. Russ just had shorts and a t-shirt. So we walked down a street for a long way and finally gave up hope of finding any restaurants because we were apparently walking down furniture store road. So we turned around and went back and went to pretty much the first place we finally saw. I got some really good squid spaghetti stuff. After lunch we took another taxi to the Taipei 101, which is I think supposed to be the world’s second tallest building. It’s also another fancy mall. We went to the place where you buy tickets for the observation tower but they told us the outside viewing area was closed and it was cloudy so we decided to save our money and not go. We ended up going to the Astronomy museum instead but we got there at about 4:40 and they stop selling tickets at 4:30 because they close at 5. But since we’d made it all the way there and didn’t know what else to do we bought tickets for an Imax movie. While we were standing in line we realized we were the only people there without little kids. We also had no idea what we were going to watch. It ended up being Attack of the Space Pirates and the people working somehow guessed that we didn’t speak Chinese so they showed us the seats that had headphones for translation. It was funny because it was an American movie already translated to Chinese so the version we were hearing actually fit the lip reading on the screen. It was pretty much the worst movie I’ve ever seen though. It was animated but it was a still picture half the time and the plot was ridiculous. After that we decided to head back to the ship which turned out to be another adventure but we made friends with an American guy who lives in Taiwan now and he and his family helped us figure out how to get back to Keelung.

The next day I went back to Taipei with 3 other girls and we went to the CYK memorial hall. Then we split into two pairs and Kayla and I went to a glass museum while the other two went to the National Palace museum. I’m really fond of glass art. Not sure why, but I think it’s really great. When we met back up we took the MRT to the Taipei 101 and this time we went up to the viewing floor. It had just gotten dark so we saw all the city lights. Then we went back to the ship.

The third and final day I went to Taipei yet again with my friend Matt. We ended up talking to a lot of locals and visited the 228 Peace Memorial Park. And we had a lot of food we bought at bakeries in the train stations.

Taiwan was pleasantly surprising, considering I had no plans or expectations. It was better that way, I think, because you can’t get upset about things not going according to plan if you don’t have a plan.