Taiwan, Taipei: The Chang Dynasty

Taipei, the city with the world's tallest skyscraper (at least at the time of writing this journal entry), was a large, modern Asian city where we enjoyed spending a few days of our time. Vivian, our friend whose Chinese name is Hui Wen, showed us some of the interesting sights of the city when we were there, and we had a great time.

Vivian had picked us up from the airport and taken us to the centre of Taipei, where we were staying for the night. She had booked a room for us in First Hotel, which was very nice and conveniently located in the city. Thanks again, Vivian, for sorting out our travel arrangements when we were there - it is still most appreciated!

Don't listen to anything you're told in Taiwan, China or Hong Kong - stinky tofu tastes just as it smells...like poo

We arrived in Taipei the day before travelling south on the island of Taiwan to Hualien. On our first day in the country, Vivian made sure that we were treated to some of the best Taiwanese food on offer. So, she took us to a famous dumpling restaurant in Taipei called "Din Tai Fung". We shared several dim sum dishes, and all of the pork, shrimp and vegetable dumplings that we ate were filled with a delicious mouth-watering sauce inside.

After stuffing ourselves with the great food, Vivian took us to see the enormously tall Taipei 101 tower, which was the world's tallest skyscraper that we mentioned at the start of this journal entry. We walked around the area quite a bit before checking out the shopping mall at the base of the tower. There, we enjoyed ice coffees and had a long chat, catching up on the past few years since we last saw Vivian in London. After drinking the coffees, we went into a large bookstore and spent half an hour looking through travel books, talking to Vivian about our travel plans for the second half of the year.

When we left the shopping mall, it had gotten dark and we were able to see the fabulous tower at night. It was lit up really well and, during the time we spent in Taipei, the lights changed quite a bit each evening. There were many other shopping malls in the area and Vivian took us to a cinema located inside one of them. We saw the film "Wild Hogs" with her and we all enjoyed the comedy. After this film, Vivian decided to go home but we stayed on for another film - "300".

For those of you actually keeping up with our journals, you will remember that we have wanted to see "300" since Chiang Mai, Thailand. The verdict was good, we both liked the film and decided it was worth staying up late that evening and having to pay for a taxi journey back to First Hotel.

The next morning, we had an early start to head to Hualien. Vivian met us at First Hotel and we hopped into a taxi to Taipei Main Railway Station where our journey to Hualien would begin. A few days later, we arrived back at Taipei Main Railway Station, pleased to have had such a good time in Hualien. Click back one journal entry if you haven't read it yet.

For the remainder of our time in Taipei, we stayed at a hotel that was only a three minute walk away from Vivian's parents' house in Banciao county, a suburb of Taipei. The MRT station nearby was Fuzhong and it was a quick ride into the centre of Taipei where all the action was. The Chinese name for the hotel is Mong Chi and it translates to Colourful Dreams Hotel, so we probably won't refer to the name anymore, since it is a bit cheesy. The hotel was very nice and had free internet inside the room - the hotel was a bit like the Malmaison hotel chain in the UK, with a trendy, sleek, modern feel to it.

The three of us went back to the Taipei 101 area as we wanted to see Spiderman 3, which had just opened a couple of days before. Before the film, we had dinner in the food court of one of the large department stores outside Taipei 101. Dan enjoyed a bowl of spicy Southeast Asian soup and Kyle and Vivian enjoyed spicy Korean dishes. The film was excellent; we all enjoyed it and were happy to have had the chance to see it the day before it opened in the US and UK.

Taiwan's cinema scene is much more closely aligned to the US than Southeast Asia's or China's has been. Some of the places we visited in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Hong Kong) had recent films on release, but others (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Brunei and China) had very limited films for us to see, if any at all. So, you can imagine our joy when we first visited Vieshow Cinema, previously a Warner Brothers cinema, and saw over ten different English language films showing, all of which were very recent releases!

On the Friday of our week in Taiwan, Vivian had to pack for her move to Melbourne, Australia, to work on an Accenture project there. Since we were left on our own that day, and since we were a bit tired from travelling, we decided to have a lazy day at the cinema and shopping mall. We saw three films that day - "Perfect Stranger" with Bruce Willis and Halle Berry, a horror film called "The Hills Have Eyes 2" and a Disney film called "Meet the Robinsons".

Between the films, we had a very delicious lunch at Chili's, which just happened to be next door to the cinema. It was pretty much as tasty as the Chili's meal we ate in Kuala Lumpur in the Petronas Towers shopping mall back at the end of January. Getting a quick fix on tortilla chips and salsa really helped us prepare for the final stretch of Asian food that we would have to endure over the next 6 weeks. We also spent some time in a coffee shop next door to the cinema, working on this travel journal.

That evening, we visited one of Taiwan's largest and best night markets, with both Vivian and her sister, Hui Hui. It rained a little bit, but it was only a drizzling kind of rain, so we didn't get too wet. The night market was really great, with many food stalls and shops selling clothing. There was a large section of games at the market and the four of us had fun playing many of them. The most exciting part of the market was the pet area, where there were hundreds of puppies and kittens, amongst other more unusual pets. The people selling the animals took such pride in them that the animals were being pruned and preened; many of them looked like little princesses.

At the night market, we tried a few different Taiwanese snacks. The most horrific was definitely the congealed pig's blood on a stick, covered in a peanut powder. Vivian and Hui Hui bought one for us to try but didn't tell us what it was at first. They just said to try it and see if we liked it. Our initial impression was that the snack was okay, but it had a funky aftertaste that neither of us could quite place. After a couple of bites each, Vivian revealed to us what it was made of, and we quickly deposited it into the nearest rubbish bin (that's the same as a trash can to the Americans reading this).

We both agreed that the best thing we tasted that evening was, most definitely, bubble tea. Bubble tea was an iced tea with milk, sweetened and full of little black jellies (jelly in this sense is the same as "jello" in the US). The drink had a sealed lid and a large round straw sticking into it, which was used to suck up the jelly balls at the bottom of the cup. The jellies were chewy and sweet and the tea was very creamy.

Stinky tofu, also known as smelly tofu, is known to us as plain old shit. We really hate the smell of it, we think it smells like human excrement. However, the Chinese and Taiwanese LOVE the stuff, so we relinquished and let Vivian buy us a piece to taste. Kyle took the first bite and, when he thought that Dan would not eat any at all, he ate another piece just so that Dan would think it tasted okay. The tofu actually tasted disgusting and Kyle nearly puked when he ate the second bite. Dan took a piece in his mouth and started chewing it; within seconds the piece was out of his mouth and he was frantically rinsing the taste away with bubble tea. Please don't listen to anything you're told in Taiwan, China or Hong Kong - stinky tofu tastes just as it smells... like poo.

Vivian and Hui Hui were quite hungry, so we went to a large food market for their dinner. We were still stuffed from the Chili's meal earlier that day and therefore didn't eat anything else; it could just as well have been that the stinky tofu turned us off food the rest of that evening. After eating, we headed back to Fuzhong to call it a night. The next day, we had planned to see many sights in Taipei but the weather did not cooperate. It poured and poured down with rain all day long, but the day ended up being one of our most favourites in a while!

Vivian's mum cooked us a lovely meal for lunch, and we should also mention that Hui Hui chipped in as well, by cooking some breaded stuffed pork and cheese things that were very good. After the meal, we decided to stay inside for a little while, to see if the rain would let up. All of Vivian's family was home that day and we got to meet her sister Grace, who was the proud mother of an adorable little baby girl, and her brother Ryan, who used to be Joe, but changed his English name recently to something he felt was trendier than Joe. Vivian's parents were there, too, and we are pleased to say that all of the Chang family members were very nice and it was pleasant to spend the day with them.

With Vivian, we taught Hui Hui how to play the card game "Kings in the Corner" and we had fun playing it for a couple of hours. After that game was finished, Kyle decided to teach the other three how to play blackjack, to share some of his experience from previous casino visits. Dan chipped in with his experience, too, and for a few hours, we all played blackjack, betting with Vivian's Taiwanese coins that she had been saving up.

The rain still hadn't let up and we were getting hungry so we ordered Domino's pizza to be delivered. We all enjoyed the pizza and afterwards, we decided to watch a DVD. We chose "Hannibal Rising" but we ended up going to watch it with Vivian at our hotel room. We couldn't hear the film very well due to the rain outside and Vivian's parents loud goldfish bowl filter. The movie was good, we all enjoyed it.

On our last full day in Taiwan,Vivian's brother Ryan offered to drive us to an old gold mining town north of the city, called Jioufen. There, we saw places that have been highlighted in famous Taiwanese films. The town was built on a hillside overlooking the ocean, and had many narrow, steep lanes. We had a great lunch there, consisting of steamed dumplings and Chinese tea. One of the best things about Jioufen's busy little streets was all of the free food and drink samples that were on offer at the little gift and souvenir shops. We tried so many strange foods and delicious teas that day, including a famous Jioufen dessert consisting of many different types of beans and jellies, served over ice and in a sweet juice!

After visiting Jioufen, we stopped off at a large fish market just outside the town. The market was one of the cleanest we had ever seen and was certainly the best fish market we had seen in Asia to date. Ryan drove us through a large Taiwanese port town on the way back to Taipei and, when we arrived back in the capital city, he dropped us off at the Presidential Building, so we could snap a couple of photos of that and the South Gate entrance to the city. From there, we walked to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall where the National Theatre and the National Concert Hall were located.

After seeing some of Taipei's sights, it was time to eat dinner, so Vivian took us for our final dinner in Taiwan. We had a delicious meal at an Indian restaurant called Tandoor; the food was comparable to Indian restaurants in London, and the place was even set up like the curry houses we know and love - we felt very much at home. During dinner, Vivian's good friend from Cambridge turned up to bid goodbye to her, since she would be leaving the next day for Melbourne.

When we finished shovelling tons of Indian food down our throats, we had one final stop to make before heading home for the night. The snake market in Taipei was set up so that you could choose the snake you wanted to eat, and the restaurants there would cut it up in front of you and cook it. We didn't witness this but we did see many snakes in cages, waiting for someone to choose them for their next meal.

Our flight back to Hong Kong left the next morning, so we had an early start to get to the airport. We rode a train to the airport on Taiwan's new high-speed railway and it was a shame that the journey only lasted a few minutes, as the train was so nice and comfortable. At the airport, we were able to use the airport lounge, since we flew on Cathay Pacific, a member of the OneWorld Alliance. The lounge was really nice, and they even had a noodle bar where we enjoyed spicy peanut curry noodles and many other treats while waiting for our flight.