Early on a Monday morning, I slept as much as I could, checked out of my Hong Kong airport hotel, and bounced over quickly to the airport for my flight. (Proximity to the airport for this flight was another reason for moving to this hotel from my SoHo Airbnb.)
My initial plans for Taiwan were to immediately hop on a southbound train out of the city and go to Taroko National Park for a couple days, but this plan started to unravel before I even got on my flight. I had previously emailed the lodge I wanted to stay at and received a positive, yet slightly cryptic, response from the owners. It was obvious they didn’t speak much English and now that I was trying to confirm my reservation, their response was very brief and not reassuring.
All my attempts to text or call the lodge while taking the Taipei MRT into the city resulted in similar failures. Half an hour later, I found myself in the large open hall of Taipei Main Station, sitting on the floor facing the ever-changing train departures board, wondering what to do. I was feeling a bit weary from the weekend and the travel and that basically made the decision for me: instead of a 3-hour train ride into the unknown, I opted for a local hotel and two extra days in Taipei.
After checking in to my window-less cave of a hotel room – common in Taipei – I wandered my immediate neighborhood (Zhongzheng) for the rest of the day, getting the lay of the land and my first taste of Taiwanese daily life. It was immediately a noticeable change from Hong Kong. Even though I was downtown during rush hour (i.e. late afternoon), everything felt so relaxed. No traffic jams, no honking horns, and not even that many people on the sidewalks. I would realize over the following week that this simply was the pace of life in Taipei. The city is objectively relaxed on its own, but the comparison with the city I had just left was actually very jarring. Hong Kong is like New York or Tokyo: people dress and walk around like they mean business all the time. Taipei is so relaxed for a capital city, I can’t even come up with a way to finish this analogy. Once I understood the culture a bit better, I really enjoyed having a calmer pace of life for my week of holiday.
That evening I stopped by Jap Jap Bikini, a new restaurant in my neighborhood with comfort food and Taiwanese craft beer. No, for real, that’s the name. Potential offensiveness aside, the food was tasty, the craft beer was surprisingly good, and the waitress who spoke English was incredibly helpful with advice on what I should do during my stay, even marking up my paper map with tips and ideas. Since my diet is a bit more flexible these days, especially when I’m on the road, I decided to get weird and dive into some Korean fried chicken, probably only the second or third time I’ve had fried chicken in the last decade. It was pretty magical.
After 12 hours of sleep in my wonderful pitch black cave, I grabbed my camera the next morning and spent most of the day wandering more nearby neighborhoods, roughly following the Lonely Planet walking tour. I ambled past temples, gates, and other old historical sites, rows of motorbikes, immaculate graffiti art, and lots of 4 and 5-story buildings. I ended up in 228 Peace Memorial Park for a bit, a peaceful respite from the city, which is already quite calm compared to other Asian metropolises. The motorbike culture was curious, as you usually don’t see that much in first-world Asia, but luckily the third-world hijinx of using sidewalks as parking lots and ignoring all traffic rules hadn’t caught on here. I especially enjoyed how in lots of neighborhoods in Taipei, the buildings form permanent awnings over the sidewalks, so that you almost always have a roof over your head when you’re walking around the city. It’s an intelligent urban design choice for a place with monsoons and lots of rain in general.
That evening was another calm one: dinner at a local vegetarian restaurant, a beer at JJB, some late-evening shopping at a bookstore, then a run to the convenience store to spend all my change on weird Asian snacks, as one does.
One random mention: I saw lots of claw machine arcades in Taipei! The arcades all had a single consistent color scheme and were wall-to-wall packed with claw machines. Random and kind of whimsical.
The next day, I checked out of the hotel and into the Airbnb I had previously booked, grabbed a quick Korean lunch in the neighborhood, then hopped on MRT to meet up with Max, a cousin of one of my very good friends in SF. Max has lived in Taiwan for the better part of a decade and was conveniently entertaining some friends of his who were visiting from China. He invited me to join their tea tasting trip to Maokong, which was something on my to-do list as well. After meeting them at the end of the brown line, we walked to the cable car station and took the gondola up the mountain. The relatively long ride offered beautiful views of the green valleys and mountains below and a unique birds-eye view through the floor of the gondola carriage, which had a “glass bottom”.
Once we reached the top, we walked around a bit until a light drizzle forced us into the closest restaurant, where we sat down at a table on the covered patio and had lots of green tea and some light snacks. Max’s friend Cece is Taiwanese, so she happily served as our tea guide and presided over our informal tea ceremony.
We stayed for a few hours, everyone chatting away about their work and travels and hobbies; almost everyone was from a different country, so there was plenty of good conversation. We left long after the sunset and had more beautiful views during the gondola ride down, but not before I was able to use the railing of the patio as a makeshift tripod and get a fairly clear photo of Taipei 101 in the distance.
After everyone had time to go home and clean up, we all met up for a really tasty family-style dinner with some traditional Chinese/Taiwanese dishes and one thoroughly non-traditional one: breaded prawns topped with icing and sprinkles. Somehow, it works!
After dinner, we went to Triangle for “university night”, a rowdy affair every Wednesday with lots of youngsters, ADD-inducing EDM and hip-hop, and plenty of drinking. It was fun, but being the old man of the group, I had to tap out at 1:30 and take an Uber home so that I wouldn’t be completely worthless the next day.
Thursday was spent wandering the neighborhoods of Zhongshan and Datong, initially to go to Confucius Temple and Bao’an Temple, two of the more famous temples in Taipei. Because of the light rain, not many people were at either, so as I listened to music and wandered with my camera, I essentially had the place to myself. All of the imagery was really pretty, even in the rain, and I found myself wandering slower than usual and soaking up the atmosphere, the solitude, and the free time. I think it was the first time on the trip I felt like I could actually slow down and relax.
After the temples, I walked to Dihua Street, a walking street close to the river known for its shops and street vendors. After walking around for a bit and browsing a few shops, I took the advice of a paper flier I was given and walked down a side street to Scent Cafe for a sandwich and coffee. Again, I was sucked into an addictive state of peacefulness as I sipped my coffee and listened to the rain outside. I decided to scrap the rest of my tourist plans for the day and instead moved to a comfortable easy chair, ordered another coffee, and spent the rest of the afternoon reading my book in the quiet calm of an empty cafe on the other side of the world. Sometimes it’s the unplanned, quiet moments like this that are some of the most memorable.
Friday morning, I took the MRT to the end of the green line for a bit of hiking and photos at the lake in Xindian. It was a gorgeous day and I passed a few others who were also enjoying the sun and the views from the suspension bridge, the main draw of the area.
After getting my fill of the beautiful lake views, I hopped back on MRT towards Beitou, but first made a quick stop at Lan Jia to try the best gua bao in the city. It’s a popular Taiwanese snack of minced pork, pickled mustard greens, and ground peanuts. And it’s really good.
The rest of the day was spent in Beitou, an area north of the main part of the city, mostly known for its beautiful scenery and plethora of hot springs. Even though the train ride from Taipei Main Station was relatively short, the peaceful nature felt really far from the city, so I walked around for a while with no particular plan.
When I stopped to read a sign of the area with a map on it, a sweet older Taiwanese woman came up to me and told me all about the area and the history and the various activities. She explained that she’s a tour guide in the area and that this was actually her day off, but was happy to offer me lots of recommendations. I took her advice and walked to the thermal valley, a steaming, sulfuric lake that feeds the hot springs in the town below, before hungrily devouring an amazing seafood curry at a cute Japanese restaurant nearby.
After lunch, I walked back to town and picked one of the bath houses that the off-duty tour guide had recommended, not realizing that it was fully nude. By then it was too late to turn back, so I forged ahead. Ten minutes later, I was sweating like crazy in a small pool of 40-degree mineral water with a dozen naked Taiwanese men. The woman at reception made sure to explain that the water is so potent that I shouldn’t spend more than five minutes in the water at a time. The advice was mostly unnecessary, since I had to get out every five minutes anyway just from the heat!
That evening, I met up with Max and a few of his friends for beers and video games at his friend’s apartment. It wasn’t the most authentic Taiwanese experience, I know, but it was really pleasant to have a casual night with good people.
My last full day in Taipei was more of my favorite sightseeing formula: taking the MRT around town, eating, and taking photos. I made the obligatory tourist visit to Taipei 101, ate lunch at Vege Creek (a noodle soup restaurant where you select your ingredients like you’re grocery shopping), stopped by the Kavalan shop for some tastings and to buy whiskey for my parents, bought more pineapple cake (a classic Taiwanese treat), drank milk tea, got a massage, had a fancy coffee in my neighborhood, wandered around the Raohe Street night market, and ate a rice fish burger for dinner. (The bun is sticky rice, the patty is fish.)
Sometime in the middle of the day, I found myself at the Red House – a historical landmark building – since it’s next to the MRT station in Ximen, the neighborhood I was staying in. There was a lot of activity that afternoon: vendors with gifts and crafts, a stage with various performers, and people from different charities looking for donations and volunteers. Now is a good time to mention that Taiwan is probably the most LGBT-friendly place in Asia, so it’s actually not unusual to see all this family-friendly activity next to the very gay-oriented bars and shops that are next to the Red House.
Funny enough, I ended up at one of those bars that very evening with Max and his friends for some drinks after some light bar hopping earlier in the night. On my drunken walk home, I wandered into one of the (evidently 24-hour) claw machine arcades and put my Ballmer Peak talents to good use.
After staying out late Saturday night, I didn’t have much energy for anything big on Sunday, plus I had to catch my flight in the afternoon. After I checked out of my Airbnb, I stored my big backpack in a locker and wandered around the labyrinth that is Taipei Main Station, perusing the vendors’ tables, smelling the stinky tofu, buying some curious Asian snacks, and finally settling into a bowl of spicy, black pepper beef noodles, another Taiwanese must-eat item. The absurd amount of black pepper had me crying about halfway through the meal. It was great.
And with that, my trip came to an end. A Westerner would probably describe both places I visited as “China… but not really China… but actually yes, China”, but even then, they were so very different from each other. I loved the vibrancy and frenzied pace and Western influences of Hong Kong, but also really enjoyed the tranquility and easy pace of life of Taipei.
I still feel a bit disappointed that I didn’t see any other parts of the country, but now that I’ve been to Taiwan, I would feel pretty good about visiting again someday, getting out of the city, and traveling around the island. After all, it’s only a flight away from San Francisco!