Surprise! My exotic adventure is Taiwan! My very first trip to Asia, and my first international trip outside of Europe or Canada.

Also, the first part of this blog title is how you say “Happy New Year” in Mandarin, a little different from the gong hei fat choy that I learned in Cantonese, but much more common in Taiwan.

Chinese New Year was on the fifth, so lots of people go home to spend the holidays with their families. My buddy Nicholas decided to join in on the fun, and I decided to tag along, because that’s what unemployed Lizzies do.

(Woah. I’ve never tried to pluralize my name in writing before, but that seems to be the way to do it???)

Nicholas’s original trip was just supposed to be himself and his brother, Jeremy, and they planned to meet up with a couple friends here visiting their families. I am grateful they took me under my wing, because I find it hard to believe I would have made it here on my own. And I didn’t have to plan anything besides the flight, thank goodness.

I left Sara in Copenhagen around five in the morning on Saturday, and the streets were quiet. I practiced the last of my Danish, wished I had more time, and got a last minute stor chokoladeboller from Lakgagehuset. All in Danish! Whoop whoop! Then I had a quick flight to Frankfurt.

The transfer in Frankfurt was a bit stressful. It was about two hour layover, but I had to exit the terminal, switch terminals, check in (no online check in was available for me), and then reenter security. By this time, only middle seats were available. (On a 12.5 hour flight! Ugh.) Then security took positively forever. I couldn’t figure out why it was taking so long, but then, as I finally approached the security point, I found out they were literally patting down every passenger. What the what?! I was not pleased and did not find entertainment in the security woman’s jokes as she rubbed down my chest. Uck.

But anyway. The flight was not horrible. We got a full lunch, a full dinner, several snacks, and a sandwich for breakfast. They also came around several times with trays of juice, and both lunch and dinner came with little plastic tea cups that they filled up partway into the meal. Oh, there was also free wine. Always take the free wine.

The boy sitting by the window was pretty cute, and he made it his personal mission to take care of me during the flight. Each time I left to use the restroom (only four times during the whole flight! I held it a lot because the guy on the aisle kept sleeping), he would pick up all the things from my seat and hold them for me until I sat back down. He also helped me out when I burst into a spontaneous nose bleed. So wonderfully embarrassing. He had been studying abroad in Germany, with original plans to return in March, but his exams finished early and he was going home to surprise his family for the new year. So cute! Nicholas was disappointed I didn’t get his contact info so we could meet his family. Crazy white boy.

The boys touched down around 5am, and I landed an hour later. We had quite the fiasco trying to navigate the airport in search for each other and for foods, but we finally made it out by eight or so. 

As we wandered the colorful streets of Taipei city, I oggled the cheap and yummy looking food. Before spending some time in a park near our Airbnb, we stopped for very cheap bubble tea (less than $1.50!), and I decided to try it warm because my throat was hurting a bit. I was surprised to find that the cup was too hot to hold, but I was even more surprised when Jeremy busted out a bubble tea holder just for this kind of situation. What a crazy world we live in.

I also tried to do a pull-up when we came across a playground. (I did my first pull-up ever, in my entire life, on January 5th tehehehe.) You can imagine my disappointment, then, when I wasn’t quite able to do one. Ugh. I guess that’s what 2.5 weeks without yoga will do to you. Start-up muscles need continued exercise, and I’m afraid I’ve only been exercising my walking muscles and my digestive muscles lately. Ha! I settled for some upside-down hanging time, instead.

I also tried to use the restroom in this park, and I came across two new things. 1) The toilet paper was located outside the stalls, in one single large roll on the wall. Thankfully an elderly woman entered before me and grabbed some before entering the stall, so I did the same. 2) Some toilets don’t have seats.

This is a squatting toilet. It took me back to the day my Chinese grandmother took me to mall when I was around five or six years old. When I had to use the restroom, she went into the stall with me and ‘taught’ me how to stand on the toilet seat and squat over the toilet so my legs wouldn’t have to touch the seat. It was mortifying.

Even more mortifying was exiting the restroom, explaining the toilet to the boys, and learning that there are usually multiple toilet types in the restrooms. The type of toilet (these squatting types, or the sitting ones I’m used to) is depicted in a little picture on the door. So basically, I experienced the squatting toilet for nothing. Haha. Whoops.

We finally made it to our check-in time so that we could get rid of our bags and really start exploring. Our explorations included a stop at a very cheap, pretty yummy, very not-clean street-side “restaurant.”

The first white person I saw besides my travel buddies was a man performing an escape routine. He was untangling himself from a mass of chains while the Star Trek theme song blared around him. His crowd was huge, but what was crazy was that probably 2/3 or more of the audience swarmed to add money to his bag when he finished. Anywhere else, I feel like getting money from 1/4 of the viewers is lucky. I guess that’s what happens when you perform in a place that still runs mostly on cash, where coins range from about 3 cents to $1.50. Makes for easy hand-outs.

We then tried to walk along a bridge by the water, and I tried to pretend the zooming scooters flying past us in the other direction weren’t terrifying.

At one point, we came across a smoothie shop that straight up just stole all of their smoothies from Jamba Juice.

The only smoothie on this board that isn’t a Jamba smoothie is the “Choir Kiwi,” which makes sense because that name really doesn’t make much sense. Also, a Peach Pleasure doesn’t actually have berries in it. I was tempted to try one, but I wasn’t impressed with the price range – I think they stole that from Jamba, too.

Next, we explored The Red House, a market place which was really close to where we were staying. Lots of cute little shops in here.

I took no time dilly-dallying when we stopped back at the Airbnb for a nap. Had to save up some energy to explore our first night market!

Such animal. Many food. Dinner included an oyster omelette (not for me) and wonton soup (yummy!). There was even one of those fishing games, except instead of fishing for little plastic fish whose mouths open and close automatically, you could fish for actual live shrimp and then actually eat them.

I also shopped a bit. Loot included keychains of my last name and shoes that are not flip flops or snow boots. Yay!

Then sleepers. We kicked off Chinese New Year’s Eve with a visit to Taipei 101, the tallest building in the country. It’s normally $40 or so to get a view from the top, but Nicholas got those hook-ups at Google, so a wonderfully nice woman from the Taipei office let us in to give us a tour! Even though Google only goes as high as floor 76, we were still far and away taller than everything else in the city. Pretty cool, dude. Plus, free snacks. 😀

Here’s pictures from the outside and from the public areas of the building:

And here are some photos from the Google office! I’ll start with the interior decorating, all festive for the new year:

Also, it really was amazing that this Google employee gave us a tour. The office (we looked at three whole floors, I believe?) was completely empty for the holiday, and she literally only came to show us around. She said she lived nearby, so she could come whenever. She was always smiling, and she told us all about the food options (wish we could come back for free lunch) and a little bit about the office culture here.

Oh, and here’s the view!

Up in the clouds. Love it.

There was also a Lego diorama set into the floor of the city, built by first generation Taipei Googlers. It was hard to find Taipei 101 because it couldn’t actually be as tall as it is compared to the rest of the city while still fitting under the glass.

Upon exiting, I tried to have Nicholas take a picture of me with the building, and this is what I got:

Also selfies:

Next, we headed to a memorial building, closed unfortunately, for the New Year.

It was still pretty from the outside, though, and I loved the gardens.

We actually spent a fair amount of time just hanging out around on of the ponds on the temple grounds. Wildlife included several types of cranes, colorful fishies, and turtles!

Nicholas doesn’t like to smile for pictures, and that makes Jeremy sad.

Lunch was our first real meal in a full-service restaurant, and it was also the first time we all ordered individual meals for ourselves. Incidentally, it was much more money than we’d spent on food, otherwise, but it was tasty and so worth it! Still less than $10 for a big bowl of eel and beef, a side of garlic greens, and a bowl of miso soup. They also served room-temperature light tea instead of water, and the toilet came fully equipped with a heated seat and a multi-function bidet. I uh… Couldn’t figure out how to turn it off once I turned it on. Haha. That was an awkward ten seconds, let me tell you.

Then we hit up another temple, with a large pavilion filled with Chinese checkers players nearby.

This was followed by something like a four hour nap. It wasn’t meant to last that long, but…. Sleepy. And we followed this with another night market!

These things below are an interesting take on a hot dog. The white sausage is made of rice, and it would be sliced in half to made an open bun for the other sausage. I don’t think I actually tried it, but Nicholas says this one wasn’t that good. *shrug.*

I actually had two sets of dumplings. It cost me $3 for 16 of them. Crazy town.

Oh, and here’s what I meant when I was talking about the toilet type pictures:

Then I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning trying to migrate my entire blog to a different web host, at the recommendation of my tech helpers (ie: The Rubland Brothers). I think it’s working? You tell me. It certainly worked to make me very sleepy the next morning, despite sleeping until ten or so. I even stayed up late enough to do a little video chatting with sister Sara (the Chinese one) and my Taiwanese friend, Tiffany.

We started New Year’s Day with a visit to the National Palace Museum, the most famous museum in Taiwan.

There were Buddha, book, and Dutch-Chinese trade exhibits. We spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out how these books were read because they didn’t have margins on the non-bound side of the pages. Turns out they are essentially made of one really long, accordioned page, but then the whole accordion is bound like a normal book. A lot of the books on display were also part of a set, and these sets came in a box.

Also kind of funny was the fact that the two most famous pieces in the museum were a piece of cabbage carved from jade and a red stone carved into the shape of a piece of meat. The latter was titled “Meat Shaped Stone.” Unfortunately, BOTH were on loan to other museums!!! So silly. Here’s a picture of miniatures they were selling in the gift shop, and pictures on the wall that were meant to replace their absence.

Nicholas was most excited about these three-legged cauldrons, for reasons unknown to me. He actually explained his obsession like three times, but it still hasn’t managed to stick in my mind. Oops.

We stopped in the museum cafe to fill our tummies with tiramisu and burgers where the patties were not patties and the buns were just rice pressed into patty shapes. Quite delightful.

Then we wandered around outside the museum for a while, soaking in the mountainside and the giant tripod cauldrons.

Somehow we managed to spend all day at the museum, so by the time we left, all there was time to do was hit up a night market. Yay! To Tamsui!

The market was just one long street along the water’s edge, and it was the busiest market yet. The vendors here seemed to have several specialties, because we kept seeing repeats of very popular shops. These common foods included grilled squid that was cut open so that it kind of looked like a pineapple and sugar cane juice. Dude. We’d seen the sugar cane juice stands at other markets, but these ones were so popular that the piles of used sugarcane in front of their stands were several feet tall.

There were also bowls of live seafood just hanging out, and a little woman frying quail eggs out of a tiny cart. (We got some – they were yummy!)

Jeremy got some long french fries, and we ate them while watching a little fireworks show across the water.

And then a cute walk back through the city, with several adorable shops and lots of people to wade through. Also egg tarts. I got seven. (:

So far, Taiwan has been lovely, and I’m super glad we have Nicholas to act as tour guide and translator. Our next few days in Taiwan take us farther south, where we’ll meet up with a friend who knows the area even better and is a native Mandarin speaker. Woohoo! Until then…

一切安好/ yi qie an hao/ best wishes,

-Lizzy-wa