Taipei - one day only!

Taipei - one day only!

I’ve been pretty slack!  I’m making this post about 4 1/2 months after I got back to Australia so I wonder how many details I’m going to remember!  I also didn’t have internet access while in Taipei so I won’t have my google location history to help me out.  Here we go.

Since I couldn’t get a direct flight to Australia from Seattle I decided to try and extend my holiday by one more day and do a decent stopover on the way home.  So I ended up with an 18 hour stopover in Taipei.  Woo!  Back to Asia!

I wasn’t planning anything too ambitious for the day.  Mostly just an opportunity to hit some of the major tourist sights and walk around a bit between flights.

I only managed a couple of short naps on the plane but I was feeling pretty good and ready to do some walking.  Stashed my bag in a locker at the airport (not an interesting airport) then found a train into the city.  

The Taipei airport has these free tours you can do if you have a stopover over 6 or 7 hours I think.  You sign up, they stick you on a bus with a tour guide and drive you around to a few of the major tourist sites before bringing you back to the airport.  I had originally considered doing one of these but I would have had to hang around the airport for 3 hours to jump on the earliest tour and it would have only lasted half the day anyway.  Pretty cool idea though.

The flight arrived so early that nothing was open by the time I got into the city so I just started wandering aimlessly around embracing the sights and smells of a populous Asian city.  It was interesting being back in a part of the world where I didn’t look like everyone else.  Travelling through Russia, Poland, Scandinavia and the USA I got used to being just another white dude but I stuck out like a sore thumb here.

I ended up wandering through some random parks and stumbled across a few random temples.  Was a nice change!  I’d been templed out after the first half of my trip (between China, Mongolia, Korea and Japan) but I was now suffering church fatigue after going through northern Europe and a few temples were a nice change.  There is something about the temple style of architecture that I generally find more interesting than a church or cathedral.  Pokemon Go is still alive and well in Taipei and I saw heaps of people loitering around some pretty cool buildings and artworks and ferociously fighting over gyms.

One area I walked around near the river had this huge concrete wall with giant steel doors scattered around and labelled an evacuation gate.  I’m not entirely sure what they were supposed to be evacuating from but it was cool and imposing at the same time.

Jumped a bus out to the National Palace Museum which was pretty good.  Absolutely packed with Chinese tour groups which made it difficult to see some of the really awesome pieces but they had some great examples of scrollwork which I really love.  I reckon if I ever buy my own place I’ll be investing in some Japanese or Chinese scrollwork (copies of course!) as artwork.  I’ll need to find something that looks good but also has meaningful words.  Or maybe I’ll commission something that looks good and is actually a dirty joke or grievous insult to the person looking at it.  That could be amusing.

Went and checked out Taipei 101 which was the tallest building in the world at one point I think.  Awesome looking building that is supposed to be reminiscent of bamboo I believe.  I did not end up going to the top because the viewing level was covered in clouds for the entire time I was in the area.

There was some sort of free concert happening a couple of blocks over but the terrible Asian pop music scared me off before long.  Do you suppose Taiwanese pop music is called T-Pop?  The Koreans have K-Pop and Japanese J-Pop.  Stands to reason right?

In a shocking twist I managed to stumble across a small craft beer bar in some back street I was wandering around.  Score!  15 taps or so and I was the only Customer so I steadily worked my way through some Taiwanese breweries which were pretty good.  It’s the same beer the world over!  With the huge variety in craft beer you still mostly see pale ales and IPAs and toasty stouts pretty well everywhere.  There will be a revelation one day that all the craft breweries are owned by the Illuminati and they’ve been running a grand progress to homogenise yet another industry by giving us the illusion of choice!

I was getting a bit footsore by this point and I wasn’t hungry enough to eat so I decided to head back to the airport about an hour earlier than planned, found a pretty good noodle soup full of offal at the airport food court and then wandered around the airport for a couple of hours and tried not to fall asleep.  

I forgot to take a photo but Eva Air has this Hello Kitty themed thing going on in Taiwan.  They have a Hello Kitty plane, with a matching checkin area and gate lounge.  Weird.  But apparently quite successful.

Alas I got no sleep on the plane on the way home either!

Arrived in Brisbane on New Years Eve running on about 40 hours of no sleep and it was great to be home!  Amy picked me up from the airport and drove me over to mum's place and just like that my trip was over!