"Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo."

Room with a view: The Presidents House. 

I am beginning to realize, for me, that successful traveling is a complicated balance of responsible planning and reckless abandon with a touch of blissful ignorance.  Analogy #375: It is like baking, the sort of reward you get from taking a bag of Riceroni, adding water and nuking it for 2 min is less than, say, dusting off the Betty Crocker cookbook that mom used when you were a kid and making something from a recipe.  Even more rewarding is when you open the fridge and cupboards, stare at the available resources for a while and formulate something delicious to make.  The feeling of uncertainty and suspense invokes stress, but at resolution the reward far exceeds any prepackaged experience available.

So onward to a week in Taiwan with naught but airfare to and from Taipei, backpack, and 7 pairs of clean socks...

A good number of my travels have been with a large-ish group of people, this has its perks, but by and large I prefer a smaller group to bigger ones.  It was just my friend, Dave and myself venturing out of the relative comfort zone of Korea to a new place with a different language, and different culture.  All things considered, it was a foreboding way to start a vacation the way we did, with Dave almost choking to death on some Bulgogi the night before we flew out.

Dave averting death for the 1st time, but not the last...

That being said, we got a hotel outside of Incheon without any drama and made some half-hearted attempts to plan what we might want to do in the next 7 days.  Not far enough up on the priority was "where to sleep"...

Planning, sort of. 

The next morning started early; only enough time to pack up shop, steal one of Dave's socks and head catch the Airport line subway two stops to ICN.  We stood in line for a while to get our boarding passes before we realized that there was a special express line for passengers without baggage to check, this is why we got to the airport early after all.  Security was pretty straightforward, we joked around how we put swords and tanks of propane in each others bags when they weren't looking.  We stopped joking around when we got within earshot and put on our serious pants.  All through and with time to spare, we stopped and ate our last Korean meal for the next week or so.  Later that day we would be dining on delicious Mandarin Chinese cuisine!  We exchanged money and before we knew it we were boarding our Asiana flight to Taipei.  "Fond" would be an inaccurate word to describe Dave's feelings towards flying and he is the first person I know of who can nearly sleep through takeoff.

Over the Pacific....or docking the Millennium Falcon at Cloud City. 

Upon landing it was readily apparent that we had flown quite a ways south because instead of being frosty and frozen, it was lush and green.  We scooted through Immigration, got a new stamp on my Passport and proceeded to play the confused and lost tourist.  See: "How to get... somewhere else".
We took a bus to Taipei Main Station which is the downtown train depot for high speed rain and metro travel.  This was a good place to venture out from, we had grabbed any map that was in English at the airport tourist kiosk and started walking.

We walked around a park, saw a memorial.  Walked some more, visited a museum.  Walked some more, got lost.  It was dark now and we needed a place to stay so we hopped on the subway and took it a few stops away.  Wandered around, found ONE motel down a street and checked the price  It was decent but who knows, there aught to be more around here, heck, in Korea you can't walk a block and a half without seeing a motel.  Contrary to popular belief, Taiwan is not Korea and thus cannot be expected to adhere to the same set of expectations to such things as accommodations, WiFi availability, Bars, written language etc... If we had taken a moment to look into these things we might have been less taken aback by the lack of these things.  Nevertheless, we weren't sleeping under a bush, and nobody died/nearly died so job done.
The 2nd day we woke early to take advantage of the free breakfast that the hotel was making for us.  It was raining lightly, but other then that, things looked good.  We did a bit of subway traveling, wandering around and such.  We visited the National library, and a huge memorial area to one of the rulers who played a part in creating an independent Taiwan (on one of the occasions at least).  At the Republic of China national history museum we learned just how tumultuous the history of Taiwan had been with any number of periods of occupation.

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall

A stop by the Taipei Botanical Gardens and some adventure food left us exhausted and ready to get our hotel and put our feet up for a moment.  This was to prove quite the adventure... We walked around, up streets down streets.  Through puddles, up stairs, down stairs.  Finding a hotel proved to be like finding a taxi when you really need one... elusive.  Through the rest of the trip I would notice hotels here and there nearby where we were looking previously but at this moment, none were to be had.  After maybe two hours of wandering we went back to Taipei Station because I knew there was a hotel nearby (by the looks of it a bit pricey), we wandered in the lobby looking forlorn and generally dirty looking for a room and hoping not to wince too hard at the price.  The price of any room was beside the point because they had no vacancy for the night.  Slightly crushed we brainstormed and asked if they had a business center we could use a computer.  That they did, and my days (got that one from talking to a Englishman for a week) we checked online availability for cheaper hotels in Taipei only to find out most were booked.  I grabbed the last room at a mid-priced establishment and didn't look back.  We would be in beds soon enough.
At the hotel we passed out for a few minutes and left to go get some more adventure food.  I say "Adventure Food" because in Korea you might order something off of a menu and if it doesn't have a picture whatever comes out is an adventure, hit or miss.  After a while you get used to the kind of cues and know what food one might get at any certain restaurant.  In Taiwan, there are less pictures, and less english on the menus.  We did a lot of pointing, nodding, and hoping in restaurants... With a bit of success if I do say (I splashed some hot sauce in my eye during lunch one day, but the loss of sight was temporary.

Adventure planning. 

This was the night we sorted out our accommodations for the rest of the trip... So by day two in a foreign  country we finally had secured beds to sleep in, success!  A new problem was, that because New Years Eve was the following day there were literally no hostels or cheap hotels in all of Taipei (that we could reserve online), who would have thunk.  We instead opted to take a train out of Taipei to a smaller city on the east coast of Taiwan, Hualien.  We had time to hit the "101" which is the 2nd highest building in the world, and although there view was not perfect it was still cool to see Taipei from up high.  We caught the slow train to our next destination, Dave told me it was my job to make sure we made our stop because he is a bit narcoleptic when he is on any kind of mass transit.
After a bit of yet more walking being lost, asking for directions, getting lost again, asking for directions again, and arriving at our hostel, which at 1st apperance looked to be an abandoned building... we managed to contact our French hostel owner (who was at a festival).  We were told that we might want to check out said festival and thus we walked even more, ate some adventure soup, and experienced some adventure festival time.  When we awoke and left the hostel I then truly was able to take in the beauty that surrounded me (we arrived after dark).  Huge mountains to the west, Vast ocean to the east.  We got a suggestion to see a few things around Hualien before heading back to Taipei.  We wandered towards the ocean and found a place that rented bikes, so we did just that.  What a great experience!  It was wonderful to be out in the country blowing through palm groves, cutting through the sea breeze, smiling and saying hello with locals.  One of my best memories of the trip for sure.

Climbed a hill 

Rode a bike

Saw some nature. 

Back to Taipei, round two, we were armed and ready to get it all done.  Hostels sorted out, itinerary sorted out.  Lets do this!
Just we had planned to do the Gondola ride and zoo on the Monday, but everyone knows that the gondola is closed on Mondays... So instead, we went back across Taipei to the area where "The ground smokes and trees don't grow", I am speaking of the natural hot springs of course.  After walking passed the public hot springs and doing an extra 3 miles of walking for no good reason we went back to the public baths and relaxed for a bit.  These were the hottest natural springs I have ever been in, we were there a little over an hour and we witnessed 3 people pass out.  Goodness!  No pictures of this, because... nobody wants to see a bunch of pictures of rocks with old men passing out, if that's your deal, go visit Taiwan yourself.

The Gondola and Zoo were the crowning achievements of the 2nd half of the trip (the biggest thing from the 1st half was making it to the 2nd half).  At the top of the mountain we walked for a while (goes without saying), and had an authentic Chinese tea party.  The lady who owned the place showed us how to make the tea, and through a bit of charades and pantomiming got us to understand...  We sat for a while, looking out over the tea plantation admiring the view before seeing the animals at the zoo (this was what Dave was looking forward to the most).

The zoo was nice... Pandas, Tigers, Bears, Raccoons...Wait, raccoons?  Yeah, the rodents that tear open garbage and make nests in woodpiles on my back porch are regarded as unique and fascinating animals here in Taiwan.  A raccoon never had it so good.  Also, Dave broke his backpack,  his 3rd in as many months.  I thought this was hilarious and Dave said a lot of Brittish things I couldn't understand because he was pretty angry about his luck with backpacks and such.  I fixed it with the drawstring from the bathing suit, good for his backpack, bad for my bathing suit.

Before we knew it it was time to pack up and leave, we spent an evening buying some souvenir type of things, crammed our packs full and set things out for the Airport journey back the next morning.
Now this is where I would expedite the rest of story because everything from here on out would have been pretty dull compared to the rest of it.  It was for me, but Dave on the other hand, had a bit of drama...
We were standing in emigration still in Taiwan when Dave goes to me, "Mike, what does your Entry Visa for Korea say under 'Entries'?", "Hmmmm, mine says 'M' for multiple." I glanced at his passport and sure enough it was stamped "S" for single.  Dave spent the next 5 hours worried that he might not be admitted back into Korea because of this.  In situations like these I am not the most reassuring type, I didn't sugar coat it for Dave, instead I just said that "Things would work out eventually" and "It's not the end of the world".  This was little help to Dave, and for all I knew he was going to be sent back home to England.  Dave got through fine, turns out our Alien Registration Cards serve as a multi entry visa too.  So hey, no harm, no foul right Dave?

I barely turned my heat back on at my apartment before I fell asleep and had to go back to teaching the next morning!  No rest for the wicked.  What a great trip and I am excited for my next international adventure!

Going Home to Korea

I periodically remind myself that this is "Real Life", I am really here, I am really doing this, tomorrow is really up to me.  I'm not resting on my laurels, I must work hard to see where I can go from here!


 "A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is than he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."  Oscar Wilde.