Brandon: Taiwan, part 1: Airplane, the movie, the sequel.
We started the trip just like any other. Our bags were packed, and we were indeed ready to go.
Star had deposited her hair on my carry on bag, Vikki had a detailed
checklist of how and when everything needed to be done while we were gone, and I was probably just fumbling around with my DS. After our neighbor dropped us off at the airport we checked in, hoping our giant, enormous, seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time bag would be under the 50lb limit for checked luggage. Fortunately, it was, and we set our sights on Seattle.
The flight to Seattle was uneventful. At first I was worried about taking a turboprop instead of a jet, but it wasn't that much slower or noisier. According to the nice in-flight magazine it also saves fuel for Horizon Air, the regional counterpart to Alaska Airlines.
Once we arrived in Seattle we went to go find our gate for the 13 hour flight to Taipei. Things went smoothly, and as we found the China Airlines gate we found our first instances of "chinglish". Now, you may be saying "but Brandon, isn't it engrish?" No, engrish would be Japanese. It's "chinglish" because its the bad translation of Chinese.
At any rate, we had a few hours of time to kill, since our flight out didn't leave til the wee hours of the morning. We sat around listening to whatever was being pumped through our respective
headphones.
At last, the appointed hour had arrived. We were loaded onto our
Airbus A340-300 aircraft, and we soon found out that coach seats are coach seats, no matter if you are flying 3 hours, or 13. The nice thing about this plane was the fact that each seat had an on-demand entertainment system. The selection of movies was decent. I watched Iron Man and half of Prince Caspian. I also got a chance to watch some random documentaries on Taiwan. The food was
edible, nothing too great. The plane had nice 2x4x2 seating, so Vikki and I got a set of seats to ourselves on the side of the plane. I tried to get some sleep but just couldn't get comfortable. I think Vikki was able to snooze a little. After what seemed like an eternity we filled out our little immigration cards and landed in Taipei.
It was about 5:00 AM when we got there. We walked off the jetway and went towards the baggage claim. We were kindly greeted by a sign telling us that drug trafficking was punishable by death. That's always good to know. The airport had signs in Chinese, Japanese, and English, so getting around wasn't a problem. We got our bags and headed to immigration. The guy didn't even really look at our passports, just stamped them with the "i'm too lazy to do visa paperwork, but I'm from the US so it's cool" 30 day visa. Customs was easy too, they didn't even really look at our bags or anything. We even went through with a whole pharmacy of prescription drugs.
We were tired, but excited. I mean, it was just an airport, but it was a foreign airport. We went out to the arrivals area and found
Brent waiting for us. First time I had seen him since he went to Taiwan, and I was glad he hadn't lost his sense of humor.
Now that we had our
sherpa guide we headed to Daisy's house. To do that, however, we had to get a ride to the MRT, the light rail/subway system of Taipei. A bus could get us there, but the lady at the ticket counter assured Brent that there was no bus that went to Taipei Main Station for another hour or so. We got our tickets and waited. After about 5 minutes however, another bus driver came in saying that he was about to leave for Taipei Main Station. We took the chance and hopped on that bus. Apparently we had to get a refund for our other tickets or something. I don't know, I was too busy messing with the
stuff on the bus.
The bus ride was fairly comfortable. I spent the whole time gawking at the weird signs, weird buildings, and tons of advertising we passed on our way to the station. You still drive on the right in Taiwan, road signs are still green, and people still drive crazy. The bus was a fun little detour til we got to Taipei Main Station.
Now, a bit about Taipei Main Station. This is the place where the MRT, the HSR (High Speed Rail), the normal passenger rail, and a ton of buses all come together. Think of it as something like Grand Central Station in New York. Now here we are, a bunch of white folks dragging a giant black bag and other assorted luggage through a terminal that was probably just getting to the end of rush hour. It was pretty crazy. Brent got us some
tokens for the MRT and we hopped on the train. It was packed, of course, so we somehow squeezed ourselves and our lugguage in between the people and headed our to Zhuwei.
The MRT is a fabulous metro system. It is incredibly clean. It makes the DC Metro look like crap in comparison. Its fast, efficient, and cheap. Most trips were $20 NT, that is about $0.66. If you have their metro card you get something like a 10% discount off of that, so that's even better. There are signs everywhere telling you that you can't eat or drink on the train, and everyone sticks to it. You won't see something like that in the US. Antother thing that struck me as odd was the large amount of escalator safety notices that were in every station with an escalator. If you're old, for the love of God don't use the escalator! If you wear Crocs,
you should be shot don't use the escalator, it will eat your feet! Apparently the Taiwanese are very proud of their escalator safety record and you will go to jail if you mess that up.
Every station on the MRT is announced over the intercom system in four languages. You've got your Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, Hakka, and English. At first I thought it was just repeating the station name, but it is actually four languages. For the most part, they all sound the same, but on certain stops you can hear the differences in the dialects.
Once we reached Zhuwei station we got off the MRT and stepped out into Taipei itself. OK, not really Taipei, but a suburb, but you can't tell the difference. It was a bit
surreal. The density of everything was amazing. There were tons of people, tons of scooters, tons of cars, tons of buildings, tons of advertising. It was a bit insane. Of course, that could have been the 24 hours or so without sleep.
We walked the six blocks or so down to Daisy's mom's apartment. We somehow squeezed into the tiny elevator and went to the door. Its a little apartment, but quite cozy. I crashed on the couch and played with Brent's eeePC while Vikki took a nap in one of the bedrooms. I got my first taste of Taiwanese television there, by flipping through a hundred or so channels that I couldn't understand. I ended up watching Galaxy Quest with Chinese subtitles.
More coming in Part 2!
tired: of proofreading myself.
Tags (beta): taiwan 2008
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