Well, after a couple hours fighting for space on the high speed rail, we arrived back to Taipei, the country’s capital city. Our first mission was to drop off our bags at our new Airbnb. This one was a little less cozy than our other two stays. I’ll spare you the details, but I wouldn’t stay here again!

As much as I would have loved to nap, or even just head to bed for the night, we had to turn around and head out again soon after we arrived to meet our friend Ariel at the Maokong Gondola. While we waited for her, I tried my first tea egg, which is just an egg boiled in tea and soy sauce instead of plain old water. Pretty tasty.

Then up, up, and up, we went! Not much of a view in the dark and the fog, but the lights we could see were very pretty.

Most things were closed by the time we reached the top, but we took a little hike to a tea shop that stays open late. Maokong is famous for their teas and teahouses, and it seemed like we got a fairly authentic experience.

Ariel is from Taipei, so she served as point person and translator. A man with a big smile and no teeth took our order before demonstrating how to properly prepare the tea. We settled on a local tea that is grown right on the mountain, and it was very lovely and floral.

The man explained that first, you have to wash the tea. The tea set included a tiny tea pot, a second little pot shaped like a typical milk/cream pot, a metal filter, four tea cups, and a shallow bowl. To wash the tea, the man poured hot water into the tea pot before immediately pouring this tea-hinted water over all the cups. Then he refilled the tea pot, dumped the tea cups into the bowl, and placed the cups in front of us. These, he filled with the light tea.

He explained that we could use the leaves for about five or six passes of water. If he was making the tea for himself, he could get eight to ten passes, but we were unlikely to achieve this many because we did not have the innate understanding of the timing and the tea that he possessed. Very interesting.

For dinner, we ordered fern, fried rice, fried mushrooms, and a beef dish. It was all unfamiliar and deliciously oily. The fried rice was even cooked in a special local tea oil.

The ferns were cooked with little anchovie-like fish, but we weren’t fans.

We then had the challenge of racing down the mountain before the metro stopped running at midnight, and but we made it just in time. We said goodbye to Ariel (not for long – she lives in Seattle, too!), and then it was time for sleep sleep sleep.

On Friday, our big adventure was to travel east to the picturesque city of Jiufen. There are rumors that this city was the inspiration for one of Miyazaki’s animated film settings, but apparently this really is just a rumor.

Gotta start with breakfast, though. On the menu: black tea and breakfast sandwiches. I couldn’t choose just one, so I got one pork floss/ pork sung, egg, and cheese, and another with chocolate and banana. Ugh. They were so good, I didn’t even want to try the ones the boys ordered.

The train ride was quite scenic, despite the rain.

Oh, yes. The rain. We didn’t really plan for the rain. The weather update that morning had said there was a small chance of some drizzling, but it ended up properly sprinkling and raining all day long up in the mountains. I was wearing Keds and a non-waterproof puffy jacket, so I quickly bought an adorable yellow umbrella for $1.50 and some waterproof shoe covers for $3. I was skeptical about the shoe covers, but they seriously saved my life. My shoes, socks, and feet would have otherwise been soaked through in minutes, and I would not have been a happy camper. I was sad to part with that umbrella, but it just won’t fit in my backpack for the rest of my trip. Haha.

So Jiufen is famous for two things: its views and its long, winding shopping street that spans several staircases, twists, and turns down and up the mountainside. We crushed and surged against hundreds of ponchos and umbrellas to get better looks at women hand-making calligraphy brushes, men hand-painting ceramics, trinket store after trinket store, and foods, foods, foods.

We found a lovely tea house that we decided to make our own personal rest-stop. The public toilets were hard to find, and this place was centrally located, haha.

And we tried as hard as we possibly could to peer through the clouds, to no avail.

For those curious, apparently a view of the water lies beyond, but from up on that mountain, I couldn’t tell if land, sea, or sky lay below us.

We did a lot of exploring in this foggy drizzle.

I loved it.

We eventually made it to the spot that shows up on all the postcards.

Beautiful! For dinner, we had braised pork over rice and a few different soups. Hit the spot after the chilly weather.

On the way out, I managed to snag another few of these delicious almond butter pastries that I tried in the morning. So flaky and buttery and delicious.

And then we had a long bus ride back to Taipei that spat us out right at the feet of the same night market we’d visited a few days before. I was pretty tired at this point, but since it was our last night, the boys were down to party. And by party, I mean walk slowly and eat food, haha. So market round two, we go.

It started with pork buns and a little exploration of some side alleyways that lead to the river and a pretty bridge.

I took a chance on some “guava milk,” which was basically a very light smoothie, and this helped revive me.

I also found a lady handpainting shoes, and Jeremy finally found the little tea set he’d been looking for, similar to the one we used in Maokong.

Aaand here’s a bunch more pictures, including the delicious dumplings I got, even though I was so full I didn’t think I could actually eat any of them. (I ate all of them.)

When we got back to the apartment, the elevator accidentally spat us out on the eleventh floor, instead of the seventh. The boys commented on this before unhesitatingly stepping off. I was confused. “Gonna explore,” explained Nicholas. I sighed and followed.

I’ll admit: the view from the roof was pretty cool, and because we stepped out at exactly ten o’clock, we got to see lights dancing up and down Taipei 101, just like the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower. This has always been a wonderful surprise for me, finding out that skyscrapers dance and glow in the night.

I was a little bummed when I finally did a check on the contents of my bag. I knew there was a chance things would get wet, but I had no way to prevent it, so I just hoped for the best and avoided checking all day. My book got it the worst.

After about twenty minutes with a hair dryer, the book was dry, but wrinkly. I suppose it could pass for well-loved, and this is true.

Then a very late night working on the blog (sorry, boys), before a brief sleep.

For our last day in Taipei, we decided to start with lunch at the famous Din Tai Fung housed on the ground floor of Taipei 101. (Din Tai Fung originated in Taiwan, you know.) We arrived only to find that the wait would be about an hour and a half. Not too different from the ones in Seattle, after all!

We decided to kill the time by exploring outside a bit.

This included a visit to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, reminiscent of the Lincoln Memorial.

Then back to Din Tai Fung! Learned some fun facts: the dumpling makers train for 2-3 years before they are allowed to make dumplings in front of the glass-walled display room. Each soup dumpling has exactly 5 grams of dough, 16 grams of filling, and 18 folds to form the seal.

One important distinction between this Din Tai Fung and the ones in Seattle is the prices. We feasted on pickled cabbage, minced pork with green beans, pork xiaolongbaos, beef noodle soup, and veggie pork wontons.

Oh, and for dessert, we had eight-flavor sticky rice and chocolate-filled baos.

When I say we feasted, I do not kid. And still, all of this cost under $40 total, for the three of us. So tasty.

Our next stop was the Miniatures Museum. The funny thing is, we didn’t actually see the museum. Our first and final destination was the gift shop!

I was in heaven. And I spent a silly amount of money on silly little things, including an entire tiny watermelon tea set. No regrets.

Then we popped over a couple blocks to see some famous mailboxes bent crooked in a 2015 typhoon.

Apparently these are quite the attraction nowadays, because Nicholas managed to buy a mini Lego set at the miniatures museum of these ‘funny mailboxes.’ Ha!

Then a cute little walk through some shopping areas again…

And some drinks! I got a strawberry mojito-inspired drink. Very tasty, but there were also a lot of lemon and lime rinds, and I kept sucking them up through the giant boba straw, haha.

Our next mission was to find a gas-powered stove that could hook up to a gas hose. This was one of Jeremy’s big purchase goals, because I guess it’s hard to find them in the States. Usually back home, these little stoves are meant to hook up to cartridges or tanks rather than hose lines.

The search was looking bleak, it being six pm on a Sunday, but we finally found an open shop at the very end of the road! Quite the luck. And they had just what he was looking for.

What followed, though, was a half hour conversation which consisted of the shopkeeper being concerned that we did not have the right equipment to hook up the stove and us trying to convince her that we did. This was all complicated by the fact that the woman was speaking Taiwanese almost exclusively, so Nicholas could only vaguely communicate with her. A couple passed by and tried to help out, switching between Taiwanese, Mandarin, and very slow, careful English. It was very sweet of the lady to want to make sure we would actually be able to use the equipment we were purchasing, but the whole time, I was just trying to will Jeremy to give the lady the dang money so we could move on. Instead, he kept it nervously in his hand while Nicholas, the shopkeeper, and the helpful couple exchanged miming gestures and nervous laughter. All very confusing, haha. At one point, the lady even asked if we could come back another time to prove that we had the correct hook-ups. Obviously, the answer to this was ‘no.’

Somehow, finally, miraculously, she let us take the stove. I think it had to do with me explaining to the helpful couple that Jeremy was an engineer, so he had all of the right equipment — this elicited several “ooooohhh!!”s on the part of the couple before translating to the shopkeeper — but who really knows.

The above photo was taken about ten minutes into the fiasco. Nicholas may look like he’s posing, but he was actually in the middle of scratching his chin, trying to figure out how to respond to the concerned shopkeeper. Quite the adventure.

My last street-side drink adventure was some highly advertised brown sugar bubble milk. This was literally just bobas soaked in brown sugar that were then added to a cup of milk. Surprisingly tasty.

Though it kind of feels like we just ate, our last stop in the city was food. I was just planning on getting some braised pork over rice, but we ended up with another mini feast. We managed to finish almost all of it.

Then a bittersweet last MRT ride before catching the train to the airport.

This is where things got a little complicated. Because there are two terminals at the airport, I decided to check which one I needed to go to. I looked on China Airlines’ website, and there was my flight to Vienna, Terminal 1, canceled.

Yup. Canceled. No explanation. No links. Just canceled.

I hadn’t received any emails or notifications, and I was thoroughly confused and worried. I decided to check the airport website, but I got the exact same result: canceled, no explanations.

Nicholas used his Internet detective skills to find that China Airlines announced a pilot strike two days ago and had canceled about twenty flights because of it, including mine.

The boys were in the other terminal, so I was on my own to figure out whether I was going to be able to get to Europe. I began playing scenarios in my head, trying to figure out how I would spend another night in Taipei if necessary, what I would tell my Viennese Airbnb host, etc.

To save a long story, I did eventually get a new flight by talking to the China Airlines information desk. Instead of direct to Vienna, it just had a three hour layover in Frankfurt on the way. The Frankfurt flight left at the exact same time as my original flight (until it was delayed by half an hour), but with the layover, my total travel time would be extended by about 5.5 hours. Woohoo. Could’ve been worse.

I was being such a trooper through all of it, kind of running in survival mode, but when I finally made it to security and they confiscated my nail clippers because of the “knife” attached to them (a two inch long nail file), I cried. Ugh. It’s the little things.

I was able to meet up with the boys one last time at their gate. Not sure what the two separate terminals are for if we can walk between them once we’re past security, but meh. My mood was lifted a bit when I got to see Paul do a little photo shoot with his stuffed shark plushie on the moving sidewalk.

And then I was on my own again! It definitely felt weird to not return to Seattle with the boys. I’ll come home, eventually! It just seems so far away…

My 12.5 hour flight to Frankfurt included two kinds of pasta, free wine, gelato, a weird cookie thing, one movie, and a bunch of very uncomfortable sleep.

My short flight to Vienna included the roomiest seats ever (my row only had two seats, all to myself, and the window seat was about ten inches from the wall – kinda weird), half a movie, and a chocolate swirl bun.

So that’s a wrap on Taiwan and my first trip to Asia! I loved it. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Nicholas, Jeremy, and Paul for letting me crash their trip, acting as tour guides, and putting up with my sleepiness. You guys are the bomb-diggity.

From here on out, I’m allllll alooooone. We’ll see if I can meet up with a couple people here and there, but this marks the end to long friend-accompanied days. Time to remind myself what it’s like to travel solo (and to sleep properly).

一切安好/ yi qie an hao/ best wishes,
-Lizzy-wa