So we decided to go to Taiwan, Teddi and I.

Day 0 & 1

Here’s Teddi:

She’s my travelling companion for this trip. We met a few months ago, dated briefly, then I was like, “hey Teddi, want to come to Taiwan???” After some poking and prodding, she agreed!

 

Our flight left at 6 am from SFO. We woke up at 3am(ouch!) and got some food at SFO:

 

We then took a flight to Vancouver(some beautiful mountains!):

There was this very interesting guy with a Cat Stevens shirt that was sitting in front of us. He looked like he was just enjoying life to the fullest:

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We then landed, and got sim cards and cash. Teddi didn’t have an unlocked phone, so I was the only one who was able to get data. For just $15 you can get UNLIMITED(truly unlimited, not “US” unlimited) data for 10 days, which was perfect for us.

Teddi knew a girl that had gone to college with her at CU boulder, and had graciously offered to let us crash at her place for the first night. So when we finally landed in Taipei, we went out to drinks: Teddi, her, her friend, and I. She’s sitting behind teddi in this picture:

She had moved to Taiwan about a year after graduating, and taught Art at a local high school. She was here also getting her masters. She said she loved it here and had no plans of coming back. An inspiration to us all!

 

After the drinks, we hit up the local 7/11. I fucking LOVE 7/11 in Asia. They have all the best food. AND THEY HAD THE LITTLE RICE TRIANGLES. I remember getting these in Japan when I traveled, and they were so delicious!

 

Teddi’s friend said there’s some alcohol here that can get you really drunk really fast. However, it tastes AWFUL. So bad in fact even the guy on the picture of the bottle is like, “get that shit away from me”:

Here’s a photo from Teddi friend’s apartment:

That evening, Teddi’s friend mentioned that her Wifi password was her ex-boyfriends phone #. Trying to be a gentlemen, I offered to fix it.

After trying to get to the admin panel for 15 minutes with no luck, I decided I’d just reset the router and just reset the ssid/password that way.

Big mistake.

The router defaulted to a SSID that was password protected, and nowhere on the router could I find the password for it. We even tried calling the # on the back of the router, but unfortuntely they didn’t speak English 🙁 After wrestling with the router for about 3 hours trying to figure out what the password is or some other way to gain access to it, I gave up.

Here’s the said DEVIL ROUTER in question:

If you can read anything on it, leave a comment! lol

Day 2

The next day we decided to get our nom on. Because of the time difference, we naturally woke up at 5 am. Nothing really was open, so we wandered around for food. Got some buns:

We also got some delicious Taiwanese pancakes. This is one of the top foods we got here. They’re just delicious, they’re street food, and they’re everywhere:

Anddddd even more food.

We decided to go to Taipei 101 to take some pics. After waiting in line for about an hour, we got to go to the top. When we did eventually come back down, there was literally *no* one in line! I guess we got caught behind all the tour groups that come around that time.

Here’s some pics from the top:

And the observatory:

Taipei 101 is the only building in the world with a mass dampener that’s open to the public. So we went there and took some pics. Here it is:

After that, time for MORE food! Seriously, half the reason to come to Taiwan is the food:

 

 

 

We occasionally would take the buses around Taipei. They required you to tag when you get on sometimes, and sometimes tag when you get off. Pretty confusing.

Then we got more food. I feel like that one Jim Gaffigan skit about food. “Why don’t we get something to eat, then after that, we should probably eat. Then we should definitely go eat”:

More food we ate:

After that, we were tired, so decided to go to our new hotel to take a nap. We took an uber there and….it was the wrong hotel. *Faceplam*. After wrestling with google for 10 minutes, we found the correct address and arrived.

“The room has no windows, is that alright?”, the receptionest said. Well it’s not like we really have a choice lol.

Then  we took our nap, and woke up again to meet with Teddi’s friend to go to the night market.

Here’s us playing an airsoft BB game:

Teddi’s friend being a goof:

I tried so many different things. Beef cubes, shaved ice, duck, FRIED ICE CREAM.

Here’s said fried ice cream. To me, an ice cream fanatic, I thought it was one of the best things.

The guy was like, “LET ME TEACH YOU ONE THING. THE ICE CREAM DOES NOT MELT, EVEN THOUGH WE FRY IT”

We also saw them cook buns in these giant cylindrical metal canisters. Teddi’s friend said this was the tradional way they made buns in Hong Kong:

Then we spent some time in a random bar drinking. We practiced playing around with Teddi’s camera. I got some cool pics of her, but she didn’t like them as much.

Anyways here they are:

And she got a really good pic of me!

I might update my linkedin or something with this pic.

 

Then we went back home and passed out.

Start of Day 3

Next morning, it was raining. But just a bit. We got some of the best food of the vacation at a place called Yong He Soy Milk. 

Here is Teddi delivering our freshly ordered food to our table, just like the good domestic servant she is:

This was some of the best food we had. One item had fried sesemee, with fried bread(kinda like churos without the cinnamon). Another was sweet rice porridge. And of course, dumplings.

 

Teddi is also not-so-great with the backpacking. Here she is with her oversized double bag:

She takes up like 3 people in the elevator! ?

Now we’re on the train up to Jiufen and surrounding area. More to come later!