The flight got in at 5:40 a.m., about a half hour early. I made it through customs with no problem. This statue caught my eye:
With the help of a person named Daniel from Los Angeles, who was a native speaker of Chinese, I was able to buy tickets for a bus that took us to the high speed rail line. That took about 20 minutes. Then there was a 15 minute wait for the train, which got me to the Taipei main rail station in another 20 minutes. (I probably should have taken the ordinary bus, which takes about an hour, and I would have had more photo opportunities, but, oh well.)
Here are some pictures from the train station and its surroundings. The compass rose has the symbol for “north” at the upper right side.
The train station area isn’t all high class, as you can see from this photo.
I got to the hotel around 8:00 a.m., but was not able to check in until 3:00 p.m. I left my luggage in the storage area and took my camera and walked around. I went back to the train station and bought an EasyCard, which you can recharge with money for taking the subway. You can also use it to rent bicycles.
I was trying to get to the waterfront area near a bridge; the closer I got, the sketchier the area was. I did see this interesting bit of graffitti:
I pretty much abandoned going to the waterfront, and walked back to the better part of the city, and saw that they put tags on some of the trees:
A lot of stores don’t open until late in the morning. I had to wait until after 11 a.m. to buy a SIM card for my phone. It was an interesting process, as I didn’t speak Chinese and the customer rep didn’t speak much English, but by gestures and phrase book, and an employee who happened to know a little bit more English, we got throuh it.
From there, I went to the 2/28 Peace Memorial Park, a memorial to the people killed in protests starting on 28 February 1947.
There is a stone foot path in the park, and accompanying it is an “alternative medicine” poster about how your feet control the rest of your body. Or some bullshit like that.
There is also a statue in honor of Confucius in the park:
And this inventive tic-tac-toe game in the children’s play area.
On the way back to the hotel, I passed by the Taipei bus station, which has this foliage inside one of the entrances.
I got back to the hotel at 3:00, finished checking in, and got to the room. The room is quite small. There is no closet or drawers, so I will be living out of the suitcase.
I didn’t eat a lot today. For breakfast, I passed by a Yoshinoya restaurant and had a breakfast sandwich, which I can best describe as beef and kimchi inside a “taco shell” made from the same stuff that they use for steamed pork buns in dim sum restaurants. It was really quite good. At 10 a.m. or so, I grabbed a few pieces of sushi at a sushi-to-go place in a bus station. At about 2:00 p.m. I was really hungry, and I was in a fairly upscale mall called “Q Square.” I found a place called “Minder Vegetarian” and had a 6-inch combo pizza, which had red and yellow pepper, peas, mushrooms, vegetarian ham, and some strange barbecue-type sauce on the top. It was pretty good, especially for the price of only NT$100 (which works out to about US$3).
Late in the evening I got hungry, so I headed out to a 7-11 (they are everywhere in this city) and got some pork and cabbage dumplings, yogurt, and a chocolate bar. At that hour (11 p.m.) and a typhoon coming in, I was not about to go traipsing all over hell and gone to find something better.
Speaking of currency, here is what their bills look like:
Even though I can’t read Chinese, I figured this one out within seconds.
And here is a variety of eye-catching signs I encountered during my walk. I have no idea what the “Giraffe” store sells, nor what kind of food you get at “Don Mono.” The last picture is an advert for the new Wolverine movie, complete with 3-D claws coming out of the ceiling.
