Around The World In 72 Days - Three Days To Get Settled In Taipei, Taiwan

This post is intended to give you a true picture of the travel experience as Wife and I live it. We revel in going to new places and going through the process of taking the unfamiliar and making it 'your own'.  The start...

Wednesday 27 March 5:00am

Your reserved Uber whisks you on your way to Albuquerque International Sunport Airport. Despite having forgotten this is Easter week our airline status and TSA Pre we wiz through check-in and security. Literally, literally 41 minutes from leaving our house until we are waiting for our plane, including time to get coffee and a soda. 

Fly to San Francisco International Airport. Enjoy the fine cuisine on our United Airlines First Class Cabin consisting of packaged nuts, popcorn, etc. Don't care because I knew the plane we were flying and knew they weren't going to give us anything. 

We have a 5-hour layover in San Francisco. Go to the Polaris Lounge (snooty lounge for international business class travelers except there are so many of us that it loses a lot of the desired snooty appeal). We had decided to shower the night before and hope we could grab a shower at this lounge which we did. We knew we could eat at the Lounge. It was very crowded and we were just able to eek out a seat at a table. The breakfast buffet was marginal (our long wait meant we saw the change over to lunch where the quality and options where much better).

 

After the long wait we went and boarded our Boeing 777ER for Taipei. It will be a 14 hour flight. Wife and I have a ritual. It is always so stressful leading up to one of these big trips. We always seem to finally unwind when we are on the over ocean flight that will take us to our first destination. When they hand out that glass of bubbly wine before takeoff, that is the symbol of our body and mind relaxing.

Travel Hack (courtesy of my compadre in travel, the Count) - on United 777 and 787 business class, the bulkhead seats are significantly wider! We got them for this flight and were very glad we did. Made a big difference on a 14 hour flight.

One key I have found to minimizing the effect of jet lag is to manage your sleep pattern during the journey to get yourself on the time of where you are arriving. This is easier or more difficult depending on when you depart/arrive and the length of the trip. For example, when you fly to Europe from the United States, most flights depart in the early evening, fly over night, and arrive in Europe in the morning. So if you can sleep on that long flight (between 7 and 11 hours depending on where in the U.S. you are departing from), you can be pretty well adjusted when you arrive. 

However, a flight such as we took from the U.S. to Taiwan left at 1pm in the afternoon and arrives at 7:30pm (the next day). You are arriving at a time close to when you would want to be going to sleep in the local time. In this case you try to keep yourself up most of the flight. I take a 3 to 4 hour nap and a couple of shorter naps during a flight like this to manage the process.

Arrival at Taipei was smooth, there were not many flights at the hour we arrived so we went through passport control quickly. We are staying the first night (we've leapt forward a full day to Thursday evening the 28th) at a hotel that caters to air travelers. It is not in a 'touristy' part of town. I'd asked about a shuttle via Booking which I used to make the reservation. I did this a couple of days before leaving. I got the response while I was waiting for our luggage that we needed to make a reservation in advance. Thanks. No problem. We got cash at the ATM, and caught a cab. 

Despite the poor communication about the shuttle, somehow we got a room upgrade because the room was much nicer than the one I booked. There were about 4 buses parked overnight so I suspect they had a bunch of big tour groups filling many of the rooms

We were wiped out and went to bed very quickly once we got settled. Our next step on Friday the 29th was moving to our Airbnb apartment which will be our base for the next week. We could not go to the apartment until the afternoon, and decided to get out for a walk. Looking out our window, there didn't seem like a lot to see.

But out we went nonetheless

I have to say I was particularly impressed with this playground climbing contraption. Wish our grandchildren were still young.

Unfortunately the mall itself was not opening until 11am so we continued on our walk looking for something interesting. Here, as fate would have it, we encountered the 'mother lode' of serendipitous findings. Do you recognize it?

YES! You know what I am talking about

For those of you who are fans of the Costco snack bar, you will note the offerings in the Taiwan version are a bit different.

Finally we'd killed enough time. We had to check out of our room by Noon but were not being picked up until 1:30. The one restaurant in the hotel we were planning to go to was closed. However, a second one, a Japanese restaurant was open and we had a pleasant light meal of tempura. The hostess and waitress could not have been more pleasant and accommodating even bringing in our suitcases and then taking them out to car when we were done eating. 

We arrived our new apartment and underwent the orientation of all the rules and where things were. 90% of this is usually forgotten within minutes of the host leaving the apartment. If you use services like Airbnb and VRBO you know that what you find in the rental is often a bit (often quite a bit) less than what seems to be the case when you research it. This is always fun when you are still tired and jet lagged. 

Our next adventure was trying to find the supermarket we'd been told was close by. It IS close by...if you don't wander all over the place because you are disoriented! Then there is the always fun time of trying to buy food in the supermarket of a culture where you 'normal' food items are 'exotic'. In this case, there was one tiny pack of butter in the whole store. Butter is not a big thing in Taiwanese cooking. 

Our last adventure of the day was finding a place for dinner. There were two challenges. First, don't get hopelessly lost while doing it. Second, find something you halfway understand what you are eating. Fortunately, we are in a neighborhood where there are so many eating options available that we had a multitude of options available in just a few blocks around us. (I was very careful about how we did our search so as to make sure we could make it back to the apartment.) Unfortunately, we couldn't make heads nor tails of much of the food options.

Wife was very much in the mood for something with rice and vegetables. That would be pretty standard in an American Chinese restaurant. However, 'real' Chinese cooking in a place like Taiwan is NOTHING like what we have at home. So we wandered around until we found a Vietnamese place. They must be pretty new. A pleasant young woman listened to us and pointed out what they had that met Wife's cravings. It was a good find. 

Wife's braised chicken, steamed vegetables and rice. She really enjoyed it.

I had the classic Pho which was a very good rendition of the dish.

After our meal, we came back to the apartment where not too long after coming back we collapsed again. Thus after three days, we were finally ensconced in our Taipei, Taiwan residence. 

But before I sign off, we must initiate that ongoing feature of the de-I blogesphere...

SIGNS OF THE WORLD

Seriously. This is the logo for a major chain of dim sum restaurants.

Clearly there is a difference in how the Western and Asian mind work to find the image above as appetite inducing!