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Taipei Taiwan |
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We made it! After a fourteen hour plane trip we finally made it to Taipei, Taiwan. Unfortunately, we picked a window and middle seat, which on a long trans-Pacific plane trips can make for some tense situations when the aisle guy is always asleep -- and never once got up to go to the bathroom. At 5:30 am -- 75 degrees -- our tired and jetlagged bodies were so happily greeted by a waiting Starbucks! Thank goodness we've finally started our international vacation. As we were traversing the perilous route from the airport to downtown, our lives were endangered ONLY twice by mad mobs of motor scooters. Apparently there are more scooters on the island than people -- 25 million scooters versus 25 million people. One day they will rue the day when the scooters become living conscious beings and demand Venti Coffees one and all. Taiwan: * highest per capita consumption of pork * very densely populated (second most in the developed world). We only had 24 hours in the city, so we were kind of worried about whether we could use the time efficiently. Luckliy we ran into a Pensacola FL ex-pat who told us about the pork/scooter situation, as well as giving us a full itinerary for the day. Found a room at the International Youth Hostel. Bunkbeds! First night! Honeymoon! We spent a couple hours wandering around the Peace Gardens and Memorial Hall. This area was built to commemorate the first President of the Republic of China a.k.a. Taiwan. I guess Chaing Kai-Shek, the president, unified China around 1928. I guess he was interested in a constitutional democracy, so when the communist revolution came, he was "kicked out". So now they've got a 30 foot statue of him in central Taiwan -- instead of in central Beijing. There was also an international cartoon exhibit. They were from all over the globe, and generally dealt with war/terrorism themes. You'd think it would be hard to make funny cartoons about that. But there were more than a few really funny ones. Being a vegetarian in southeast asia isn't going to be as easy as we thought. For some strange reason they REALLY like seafood. But we did find some interesting treats. As we wandered around a seaside boardwalk north of Taipei, we found nestled amongst various "meat on a stick" delights ("pork on a stick", "fish on a stick", "squid on a stick",... you get the idea): TOFU ON A STICK !!! Yeah, yer right. It sucked. We each took a bite an threw it away. Gotta love American tourists. And then we found it. The prize of all prizes. The one, the only... Two Foot Tall Ice Cream Cone (tm). Now that was a much better treat. We both took a foot each, and whiled the rest of the afternoon away. But as I said, life as a vegetarian can be hard. We next went down to the "Night Market" where we found a giant market devoted to Taiwanese food. We found fried pork, stir fried fish, various meat filled won-ton type things, meat and greens, meat and this, meat and that. meat, meat, meat. So we went to McDonalds. Once there we were so horrified that we hadn't
had much "local" food, we decided to go to the American Hotel across the
street (The Hilton) and eat in the restaurant that had a very vegetarian
friendly menu. $1000 later (new Taiwan dollars of course) we crawled to
bed sated and sleepy. |
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