Taipei: Scooter Capital of the World

Mike in a cool Chinese gazebo
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After a long 14 hour flight from LA we finally made it to Taiwan. It was a "red-eye" flight, leaving LA at around 2:00 in the morning on Thursday, October 27. Thanks to crossing the International Date Line, we landed at around 7:00 in the morning on Friday, October 28. The airport is around 30 km outside Taipei so we had to catch a bus.

Taipei is a huge city. One thing that really stands out is how densely packed in everything is. There doesn't seem to be any real single family detached houses, instead there's a ton of high rise apartment buildings with little to no space between them. Green space seems to be at areal premium. It truly is a concrete city! We were told that Taipei has one of the highest population densities of all the worlds cities. I can believe it!

We've done lots since we've been here, even though it seems like we've been asleep half the time.

This water garden was really impressive
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Our hostel is right downtown. It's called the Taiwanmex Guesthouse and it's about a block away from one of the subway stations. We're located on the 9th floor which is also the top of this building so we have a rooftop view. I've included some pictures of the views that we get.

Another thing that stands out is the number of scooters/motorcycles that are here in the city. They easily outnumberthe cars in the city. There's even traffic lanes dedicated only to scooters. We've been told that Taipei has the most amount of scooters per capita for any city in the world.

The Garden of Perfected Benevolence located at the National Palace Museum in Taipei
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Arriving in Taiwan we knew that we'd be fighting jet lag pretty bad. Still are, and we've been here 3 days now. In fact it's now around 3:30 in the morning as I'm writing this. We discovered that Auckland (our next destination) is 5 hours ahead of Taipei, so we figure that we should easily adjust to that time.

We've done lots since we've been here, even though it seems like we've been asleep half the time. We've gone to the National Palace Museum which is kind of the national showcase for Taiwan. Lots of ancient Asian artifacts, some dating back to around 6000BC. It was all very impressive, but frankly you can only see so many golden buddha statues before they all start looking alike.

The view down a Taipei alley at night
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We've checked out some of the night markets here although we haven't bought anything yet. We're a little hesitant to try much of the food. I know that it's part of the fun to try new cuisines, but neither of us are big onthe smell of alot of thefoods here. We've eaten at McDonalds and 7-11 (they're everywhere surprisingly) a few times. Hey, we need a little time to adjust alright?!?

Today we're hoping to go check out the Taipei 101 building, the worlds tallest office building. It should be pretty impressive. You can barely make it out in one of the pictures from our rooftop.

A Chinese temple. I don't know anything about this one
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There's nice people staying at our hostel, including one English teacher from Ohio named Dave. It was Dave who told us that you can't flush the toilet paper. Good to know. Gross to know too. Dave was a member of the Peace Corps in Honduras and he has lots of interesting stories.

Anyhoo, We've been enjoying our stay here in Taipei. Lots to see and do.

See you all in NZ...

Mike and Heather