My friend and co-worker Henk lives in Taipei with his fiance Mavis. They were wonderful hosts and personal tour guides, introducing us to the sights and food of Taipei. Our culinary adventure began the night we arrived in the city, at the famous Din Tai Fung, a Taipei original with locations worldwide. We ate delicious bean curd, fungus (kid you not, that’s what it was called), and cucumber appetizers, followed by pork and shrimp/veggie filled soup dumplings, ending with red bean buns for dessert. All delicious!

October 10th is Double Tenth Day, Taiwanese National Day, celebrating the Wuchang Uprising in 1911 which led to the establishment of the Republic of China (Taiwan), so Henk and Mavis were off from work. They had us up early for a traditional Taiwanese breakfast of sesame cake sandwiches stuffed with egg and fried dough (unsure of the official name) and soy milk, before heading out on the day long walking tour. We peppered them with questions about Taiwanese history and current relations with China, a very interesting topic that I knew little about. (China basically thinks Taiwan is still a part of China. Taiwan has all these songs and chants, which we heard playing in the squares a few times, saying that Taiwan and China are neighbors and speak the same language, but Taiwan is a separate country). Because of the holiday, many of the streets were shut down around the Presidential and government buildings. Here’s Henk enjoying the usually busy road all to himself. We also passed by some protests, both for and against the current president.
      

The city tour began with the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Zhongzheng Park, which resembled the Lincoln Memorial. Chiang Kai-shek was an influential political and military leader in the 1900s, and his head appears on many coins and bills. This was followed by the Lungshan Temple (frequently spelled ‘Longshan’), a very active Buddhist temple, always filled with a lot of visitors and people praying. Henk helped us buy a small trinket for safe travels, which we waved in a circle three times over the burning incense.

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall

Zhongzheng Park

Longshan Temple

Big crowds inside temple

Not the permanent home of our safe travels trinket

We stopped at Mos Burger for lunch, a Japanese fast food chain, known for using sticky rice as sandwich buns. It was then on to Bo Pi Liao Old Street, the Red House, and Huashan Creative Park. Taipei has a thriving cultural scene, with a lot of great performance venues and festivals. The month-long Huashan Living Arts Festival was starting, and we were able to walk around and enjoy some of the exhibits before catching a free drum performance in the afternoon.

We become part of the exhibit

Ryan participates in another exhibit

Ryan’s note

Drum performance

Next stop was Taipei 101, now the 4th tallest building in the world. Unique in architecture, it was designed with the structure of bamboo in mind and resembles a pagoda at the top. Taipei 101 also boasts one of the fastest elevators and claimed many other records when it was built. Henk and Mavis had already been to the top, and had a very long tea in the mall below while Ryan and I stood on line to go up, moseyed around and enjoyed the view, and stood on line to go back down. Following Taipei 101, we hiked up Elephant Mountain (more stairs than Henk and Mavis remembered) for a great view of the city.
           

Taipei is famous for its night markets, so we hit Raohe Street Night Market for dinner, where the culinary adventure really began. First up, pig’s blood cake; sticky rice and pig’s blood formed into a rectangle, on a popsicle stick, coated in peanuts (we skipped this) and cilantro. It was relatively bland; Henk said it’s better with the peanuts. Ryan passed on trying it. On to the fried stinky tofu, served with pickled cabbage and soy sauce, which mostly tasted like tofu, though it is hard to get over the smell. Next was a sort of medicinal pork soup, called that because of the healthy spices they put in. It was very flavorful, with lots of cinnamon and maybe some nutmeg, and pork ribs.
            

Ryan and I were pretty full by that point, but couldn’t pass up the oyster omelette stand, a dish that both of us had been wanting to try. It was a bit different than we expected, not a traditional western omelette, as they also use usually a potato or flour starch in addition to eggs to make the batter sort of gooey. We both really liked the flavor, but were not a fan of the consistency. All these dishes were accompanied by about three cups of melon tea, a delicious sweet tea sold at every other stand. Exhausted from the tour and with full bellies, we said goodbye to Henk and Mavis at the metro station and headed back to our hotel for the night.

P.S. I write this from Hoi An, Vietnam, listening to the heavy rain and wind outside, with occasional brown-outs, caused by Typhoon Nari. The typhoon is expected to hit this area in about 5 hours, and some hotels closer to the coast have been evacuated. All the buildings here are built to withstand typhoons, and the storm is predicted to quickly lose steam once it hits land. There’s been a lot of crazy weather in the region the past month, but we’ve been very lucky to miss almost all of it up until this point.

I really thought we’d met the nicest and most helpful people in Japan, but I was wrong. They are in Taiwan! We have been approached by countless people trying to help us navigate buses, subways, and trains. Some of the stand outs include: 1) A man in his 60′s insisted on giving me his seat on the subway because I was carrying my huge heavy backpack. 2) A man traveling by scooter on the street pulled over and asked if we needed help getting somewhere. Taiwan definitely feels more like Japan than China, perhaps due to the large Japanese influence in the early 1900s when Japan ruled Taiwan; lots of sushi and mochi, common convenience stores like 7-11 and FamilyMart, and the general friendly attitude of the people.

Our first three nights in Taiwan were blessed with ‘quad’ rooms, with a double bed for each of us and plenty of room to spread out, a nice change from the lodging in Hong Kong. Ryan enjoyed multiple boxed lunches on the trains; huge hot meal boxes containing rice, veggies, pork chop, an egg, and tofu which were surprisingly delicious and about $3. Tasty food in Taiwan is cheap and also very international. While searching for restaurants in Hualien, I was sure my TripAdvisor app had somehow been set back to Austin. The top two restaurants listed were Salt Lick (American BBQ) and Dos Tacos (Mexican). We wound up at a local seafood restaurant, Ju Yan. To order, customers go up to the glass display case and pick out their desired protein and cooking style. There was a slight language barrier, but in the end, we wound up with boiled shrimp with the heads on (Ryan’s favorite, once the heads were removed), sauteed green vegetables with mini fish pieces including the heads, BBQ squid, and abalone (my favorite). A delicious and interesting meal.

The primary reason for traveling to Hualien was to hike in Taroko National Park and visit the Taroko Gorge. We joined a small tour with a young couple from Hawaii, run by a Canadian expat. The weather was absolutely beautiful, and a typhoon two days earlier had resulted in waterfalls throughout the park. We hiked the Lushui and Swallow Grotto trails, along a cliff and through 30 meters of a dark cave. Next up was the Baiyang Waterfall trail, with incredibly picturesque waterfalls. This was followed by the Cave Water Curtain, accurately named. Our guide is very experienced, and had umbrellas available for all of us, which came in very handy.  Can you find Ryan in the waterfall picture below?
       

The last trail for the day, Lianhua Pond, unfortunately got nixed. Rock slides are very common in the gorge, with trails frequently closed due to rock slides. While eating lunch, we saw rocks starting to fall down on the trail, and though it was still open, our guide decided it was not worth the risk. Instead, we headed to the Eternal Spring Shrine, a memorial commemorating veterans who died while building a nearby highway.

Back at the hotel, I napped while Ryan did laundry.
Ryan doing laundry: 4, Nicole doing laundry:1

Dinner was at the Zhiqiang night market, where we enjoyed some local food, including coffin toast and fresh juice. Coffin toast is like a big slice of French toast, cut open and stuffed with savory delights. Ours were stuffed with sweet and sour chicken in one and pork in soy sauce in the second. The fresh juice (mango and pear), while relatively normal drinks, were delicious and very refreshing. On the way back to the hotel, we walked by an outside dance floor underneath the train track overpass, with couples practicing ballroom dancing. We mostly found this entertaining because overpasses like these are usually considered somewhat sketchy areas in the U.S.
            

Otherwise known as: Subway to a train to a plane to a bus to a bus to a train to a subway.

Taiwan has so much to offer, great hiking, amazing history, and fun cities; so much so that we totally overbooked our short 6 night stay here. The original plan was two nights in Tainan (the oldest city in Taiwan) on the west coast, two nights in Hualien to hike in Taroko National Park on the east coast, and two nights in Taipei. On the bus ride from the airport to the high speed rail station to Tainan, we decided it was just too much time spent traveling. Instead of getting a ticket south to Tainan, we booked a ticket north to Taipei, for a night’s stopover on the way to Hualien and sorted out lodging accordingly. See? I can be flexible occasionally.