Taiwan!

Yesterday, I woke up earlier than I meant to and took a last ferry ride just because I love the HK ferry. And ate breakfast at my favorite Starbucks with a harbor view. On the ferry I met some nice Canadians who were on their first trip to HK, so I told them a bit about HK and helped them find their way around. I headed to the airport and flew to Taipei. Taiwan has this high speed rail system that can go from Taipei to the southernmost city in Taiwan, Kaoshiung, in about 2 hours. I took the rail from the airport to Taipei city, and a very nice French pilot helped me find my way to buy the ticket, though Taiwan does have a lot of English signs and a fair amount of people that speak some English. At the train station I met another lost looking American named Rick. He is an engineer from Shanghai, and since I had a few hours to kill in Taipei, we decided to go to Taipei 101, which is currently the tallest building in the world. It also has the fastest elevator in the world which is crazy, it zooms up to floor 88 in less than a minute. By the time we got up there it was dark, so we saw the city by night. It was pretty cool, and there was also an outdoor deck. After that Rick helped me get a taxi to the rail station (he speaks Chinese which was handy).

This is when I had some trouble, mostly my own fault. I accidentally bought a regular rail ticket instead of high-speed to Chia-yi, and didn't realize it until I was about to board. It was supposed to get in at 12:30! So I ran to the HSR (high speed rail) ticketing area, bought another ticket, and got on the train to Chia-yi. It only took a little over an hour to get there, but by that time it was about 10 pm. I was supposed to meet Kate and Siggy at their school at around 9 pm, when they got off work. So I took a taxi to their school and no one was there. They did leave me a note with a phone number on it. I attempted to buy a SIM card for my phone, which has been very easy in every country I've been to. But here they wanted an Alien Residence Card and a passport and to do all this paperwork. Kate and Siggy don't have ARC's yet, so they have no cell phone numbers or internet at their apartment, which is inconvenient. At any rate, they found me and we met up and headed back to their apartment.

Taipei has a lot of the same chains as Hong Kong. Taipei seems more spread out as a city than Hong Kong and less frenetic. For some reason, I was thinking Chia-yi, a small city in Taiwan, would be similar to Guiyang, a small city in Mainland. However, Chia-yi has a population of 270,000 while Guiyang is about 4 million. So Chia-yi, to me, seems very quiet and has a very relaxed vibe. It's more spread out and more rural feeling than Guiyang as well, and everyone gets around on scooters, including Kate and Siggy. So I've been riding around on the back of their scooters (don't worry, we all have helmets), which has been a fun way to see the city. I am sleeping on Kate and Siggy's couch. Their apartment isn't much larger than mine, and they actually have a kitchen as well. It's a bit outside of the main city. Extremely quiet compared to the constant noise of Guiyang.

Kate made an itinerary of things for us to do here, including a trip to Tainan, an apparently beautiful smaller city, and Taipei (since I'm flying out of there). Kate and Siggy actually haven't been to Taipei, since they came straight to Chia-yi from the airport. Today, I slept in while Kate and Siggy had Chinese lessons. Some nice relaxing time. Then we went to drop Siggy of to teach class at their school and Kate and I went to get haircuts. A haircut here includes a 20-minute head massage and shampoo, and a 15-minute neck and back massage, which was great after carrying around my backpack everywhere yesterday. Then it started to rain pretty hard. We tried to wait it out but Kate had to get to school to teach. Back at school, Siggy was done for the day so we went out for dumplings. We got curry dumplings, which were really delicious. Now we are at a smoothie cafe, where I just had a delicious pineapple-banana smoothie, to use the free wireless internet.

I think this is a pretty nice vacation. It's a good change from loud and busy until late-night Guiyang.