Taiwan Day 1

Our last international port was supposed to be Japan, but because of the tsunami/earthquake we rerouted to Taiwan. People were unhappy. Everyone wanted to go to the Philippines, then South Korea, so when we got the third choice of the vast majority of the boat people were pissed.  I wanted to go to the Philippines as well. I can’t say that I had a good reason for it, it just sounded more exciting than Taiwan, but when I heard we were going to Taiwan I maintained a good attitude: I was going to go somewhere that I would have NEVER chosen to go otherwise, and I can go back to Japan and the Philippines if I want to.

When we arrived on the first day, I chose to go with my friend Whitney on her FDP to the National Palace Museum. The National Palace Museum is an art museum of the ROC in Taipei, the capital, and is one of the biggest art museums in the world. The permanent collection is over 650,000 pieces and they can show less than 10% of the collection at one.  The collection consists of many artifacts from the QING Dynasty that were collected by China’s emperors and fought over between China and Taiwan for many years. When the ROC moved to Taiwan in 1948 they took the collection with them and hid it in a mountainside and the PRC still claim that the collection belongs to them, but Taiwan refuses to return it and now has it on display for the public in the museum.

The museum was very cool. To be honest, I’m not really an ancient artifact kind of person but I definitely enjoyed it and was glad that I went. There was huge 8,000-year-old golden Buddha statues and a huge collection of jade.  I thought it was ok, but Whitney, who is an artist, LOVED IT, so for the more art-oriented people I think it, was a lot more powerful.  I did get a delicious caramel macchiato in the café. I understand coffee.

After the museum we were already in Taipei (we docked in Keelung) so me, D, Whitney and Emilio decided to just start walking and hoped to eventually meet up with everyone else.  We stopped in a gas station and bought some snacks and drinks and just started walking down the street. I had gotten a Mike’s Hard and wanted to ask the police man if I could drink it on the street (it was 6:30pm!) and it will took awhile for him to understand what I was even asking, and when he did he laughed at me! He was like “uh, yeah….” So that was cool.  No open container laws in Taiwan.

We walked and walked and eventually decided we were hungry so we went into this little place that had a bunch of food assembly-line style. I don’t think they had ever seen tourists in their life; it was extremely “local.”  We walked down the line and pointed to what we wanted and my strategy was “if it’s chicken, I’ll probably like it,” and avoided everything else.  Chicken seemed safe, and it was. And pretty good too.

We’d been walking probably close to two hours (and stopping in stores and to take pictures along the way) and hadn’t seen anything close to a hotel so we decided to take a cab to the one hotel that we knew the name of. We got there and it was $100 a room for one night, but they made it very clear that only two people could sleep in a room and we would need two rooms.  We walked across the street and saw this delightfully sketchy little hotel with the sweetest little lady working there. And I (me, yes me!) talked down a price in an establishment for the first time in my life! I got her down from $85 to $65 for the four of us and we had the cutest, sketchiest room. It’s not that it was sketchy, kind of just old, but we were very happy with it.  When SAS takes you on trips they put you up in the NICEST places. Way nicer than I would ever stay with friends, so it was nice to stay somewhere a little bit cheaper and sketchier and feel like we were actually traveling and not being pampered.

After we got settled we decided to walk! We walked through what appeared to be the local night market, which was interesting. There were a bunch of carnival games and street food.  Oh, the other thing about Taiwan, there are bakeries and pastry shops every 5 feet! They are more common than coffee shops in Seattle, it’s insane. So we walked through the market and went in and out of bakeries admiring all of the cakes until we decided we wanted to go out and realized we hadn’t seen a bar anywhere, all day.

We knew the name of one bar because Whitney had heard people were going there so we jumped in a cab there. It was called The Brass Monkey and it was basically an American Sports Bar filled with Taiwanese locals, with pool tables, foosball, and grill food. But the drinks were SO EXPENSIVE. $6 for a beer, $8 for a shot, $10 for a cocktail. This place was not night enough for that, so I put a one-drink limit on myself and Whitney ordered juice and spiked it.  Around 1:30 the bar closed and we were all tired so we decided to head back to the hotel room to hang out and go to sleep.