Taipei

My last trip in Asia was in Taipei. I went there for five nights and four days. This was longer than my original planned trip in May, which I had to cancel because I missed my flight because I couldn't get a bus in time, but not long enough for me to do everything I wanted to do, as I found out while I was there. Still, I was in a hurry to get back home and do UK student visa stuff and get ready to go to Brighton.

I stayed at a youth hostel called Taipei House, which was quite Christian and had all sorts of bible quotes all over the place, but I was willing to bear it for the price, which was only around $20 a night, and the location. I didn't bother taking any pictures of it, because I'd forgotten to dump my last batch of photos from Kate LA before I left, so I had limited disk space. I ended up meeting a nice lady from London a couple days into my trip who let me dump the contents of my card onto her laptop and email them to myself so I could erase the card and start anew. I really should get a new memory card (this one's only 128 mb), but I just don't take THAT many pictures, you know? Anyway, if you're planning a trip to Taipei on a budget, I recommend the place. They set up tours for you and everything. Here's the website:

http://www.taipeiyh.com/English/home_e.htm

It also has pictures. I stayed in one of the girls' dorms.

I got there at night, but was able to book a tour of the Beitou Hot Springs and Yangmingshan Park for the next day. The tour guide described it as "Taipei's most relaxing tour." It was just me and this other girl who was Filipino as I recall, and we were taken first to the park to walk around. There were a lot of old people there, since it was a weekday afternoon.

Then it was straight to the Beitou Hot Springs. I wasn't sure what this would entail exactly. The poster at the hostel showed people swimming, so I brought a bathing suit and a small towel. What it actually entailed was a visit to the bathhouse, similar to the Korean bathhouses of which I was so fond. I wish I had known--I would have brought the appropriate scrubby and soaps and such. 

It was just me going to the baths, since the other girl was in a certain physical state that disallowed her from entering public baths. I was given an hour and a free bath towel (bigger than Korean towels, but smaller than Western bath towels), which I now have hanging as a hand towel in my Brighton bathroom.    Luckily there were pump bottles of two kinds of soap. I guess that one was body soap and the other shampoo, and used them as such. Actually, there might have been a conditioner one, too, but I forget. I was worried since I didn't have anything but my hands to apply the soap that all the old ladies in the baths would get mad at me for not being clean enough, but no one raised a fuss. Phew. I was stopped from stepping into the cold bath from the hot bath so I could throw a ladle of water over my feet and calves first. It seems kind of redundant to me, to wash off skin that's just been cleaned and in another bath, especially since the rocky border surface that I stepped on would be the only source of dirt, and would only touch the soles of my feet, which I wasn't required to wash off. I've decided that every culture is ultimately retarded on the notion of what clean is.

After I cleaned, soaked, cleaned again, maybe soaked some more?, dried off, and moisturized with the free lotion, I joined the others, and we went back to our respective dwellings. It was a good tour. I recommend visiting the hot springs not on the tour, though, as you can spend more time in the baths and probably do some swimming and other stuff on your own schedule.

For supper I wandered around for a while and ended up stopping in some hole in the wall where there were a few other people eating. Ironically, I was looking for something more substantial than soup, which seemed to be quite common, so I pointed to a picture on the wall (no English on the wall or from the employees) and hoped for the best. It was soup. 

I think my picture looks a bit different than theirs. But it was excellent soup. Those are shrimp dumplings, and the shrimp was extremely flavorful, probably due to freshness. That might have been the third best soup I've ever had. Well, maybe the tenth. But the shrimp could have been the best shrimp I've ever had. It was only like two dollars or something, too. US, not Taiwan.

Here are a couple pictures of my neighborhood:

One of the best things about Taipei was the crosswalk lights. A lot of them had countdowns on them, but I think they all had an animation of the little green man we all know and love. He would walk at the speed you should use if you were starting to cross then, so he would get faster and faster as time progressed, until he was running. It was great.

I took this video, and meant to take a better one later, since this one is out of focus and shaky, but I never got around to it. Sorry. You get the idea.

I took another tour a day or two later, and did a bunch of stuff on my own, so I'll get to that stuff shortly.