Life as we don't know it

Taiwan Day 1

Monday, September 26, 2011 @ 2:19 AM PERMALINK

I've been back from Taiwan for over a week and its been workworkwork to earn back the money that I spent. This trip was one of the longest and most costly (since Australia) but it was so worth it.

Mandatory out of the window plane shot.

Random fact that you can skip #1: I always forget that the windows on a plane are super cold and I am always amazed each time I touch them. I also don't really like the window seat cause I'm super restless and feel embarassed when I have to wake someone up/interupt their music listening or reading. I am also constantly asleep on the plane so I feel like its wasted on me.

The flight from Singapore to Taipei is about 4.5hrs on Tiger Airways. We arrived at Taoyuan International Airport at about 230pm. To get to Taipei City centre, I heard you either pay a crazy amount of money (1200-1600NT) for a taxi or get on an aiport bus for 90-120NT. Needless to say, our choice made itself.

You can get your bus tickets the minute you leave the arrival hall from the airport, just head to the bus counters and decide which one you want to go with. There are a ton and you may have to make a decision based on price, next closest depature time, duration of the journey..but I guess its hard to go wrong with whichever bus company you pick in the end.

At the arrival hall, you can also get a SIM card. I paid 300NT, handed over two forms of identification and got a brand new Taiwanese SIM card, 300NT worth of credit (you get 100NT free for each 200NT you purchase) and a very user-friendly guide to topping up and using the sim card ( in English)

The buses are pretty regular and super comfortable. We took a bus that cost us 90NT (this bus takes about half an hour longer than the slightly more expensive bus (I paid 120NT) I took when I was leaving Taipei)

Bus seats. Very comfortable and nothing to complain about.

Our bus stopped at Taipei Main Station which is like the life source of the main types of public transport in Taipei ; the Tapei Metro Station, Railway, High Speed Rail and Bus station all converge at this location. Taipei Main is also the bane of my directionless existance as you all will find out.

Once we got to Tapei Main, we got on the Metro (and bought an EZ-card with stored value) and took the Metro to Houshanpi (the nearest metro station to our hostel)

We spent all our six nights in Tapei at The Meeting Room. At 900NT a night for a private room, it was a steal. There is only air conditioning at night from 10pm-2am which was not a problem for me. The living room is great and even comes with DVD choices.

The location of the Meeting Room is pretty awesome, its a 10 minute walk from WuFenPu Wholesale Market and Raohe Night Market.

Anyways, once we got to our hostel, Thomas showed us to our room and the facilities. There is a computer for shared usage and free Wi-fi, a full service kitchen, seperate bathrooms and showers and alot of space for chilling out. We were given our keys which would let us get into the hostel at any time.

After unpacking and resting for abit, we were off to Raohe to look for some dinner.

We found a cool hotpot resteraunt with pretty good hotpot sets going for like 120NT for a beef hotspot. The food was pretty great and the stock used for the hotpot was really tasty. After filling up on hotpot, we decided to take a look around the Night Market.

Word of the wise: DONT fill up on hotpot before visiting a night market, there was so much I wanted to eat but I was so stuffed! Good thing we were so near Raohe so we could always go back whenever we wanted.

After the night market, we went back to the hostel and the four of us (Hayley and Matt who are both teaching English in Taiwan, Hong who is half Taiwanese and is back to visit relatives since he's got discharged from the US army) tried to figure out how to work the projector to watch a movie. This was after Hayley got Matt to paste a picture of someone that looks like her above Thomas's bed and then got Thomas to hide my Big Fat Greek Wedding under Matt's pillow (neither found these pranks funny though). I also got a ton of flack for my Singaporean english AND mandrian accent. Language FAIL.

After all that, we finally got the projector to work and settled down to watch Milk with weird tasting potato chips and slightly burnt popcorn before the dvd failed and I decided to turn in.

Not bad for a first day. Not bad at all.

I would contuine on to more photographs and more touristy things but its like 2am and I have to be at work at 10am tomorrow. Soon!!

Labels: Taipei, Taiwan, travel