Torrential Taiwan: The Country That Wouldn’t Stop Raining
Talk about a downpour! In Taiwan, we slogged through the rain each and every day. Truth be told, we hadn’t had a truly sunny day since Tokyo. All through the end of our time in Japan it was fairly cloudy and rainy, then into Taiwan the rain continued. Yes, we dodged two typhoons, but rain didn’t care.
We’re troopers, we’re still new to this travel adventure and eager to explore the big and small parts of the world we’re living in, but rain made it tricky. Nonetheless, we preserved and both of us certainly learned a thing or two about Taiwan. When I left you all in the blog we had just arrived, one day in, and had explored a night market that was pungent and overwhelming. My impression was that every area of Taipei would be like this: smelly, crowded, and too compact for comfort, but I was wrong in the best way.
We didn’t give up on night markets after the first one; no sir! Night markets were in fact the top reason I wanted to go to Taiwan in the first place. Food of all sorts is my cup of tea, and Taiwanese/Chinese is no different. When you think Chinese in the states you imagine sticky, fatty fried rice with the chopped up dried pork bits and nearly dehydrated carrots and peas. It’s a sad state and it’s not how Chinese food should be viewed because it’s truly so much more than that.
Night markets give you a chance to try a bit of everything for an incredibly reasonable price. We would spend $5 – $10 tops, collectively, feeding ourselves dinner. That’s eating a bit of fresh fruit, meat on a stick, a pancake of sorts, cream filled pastries, and more. I never knew I’d like pork floss, but I love pork floss omelettes! Heaven.
The variety at these markets would go on and on and into areas that I wouldn’t touch, like dried squid, chicken feet, and various pork products sold in carts that were in unknown stages of jerkying or other transformation. I didn’t ask, they couldn’t tell me even if I did, we left it alone.
Despite cooking and washing out in the open the night markets Jason or I didn’t get sick (a welcome surprise!). I’m now a little shaky about food borne illness and trying to be more cautious, but it’s difficult to be cautious when there’s so many abundant and tasty goods. We made sure to get our water from only clean sources or bought it sealed from the convenient store at least. It was about $.30 USD for a litre of water.
Prices were great in Taiwan, and the dollar took us very far. The conversion rate was a little screwy, but we eventually figured it out. $30 Taiwan dollars = $1 USD. So, sometimes prices looked very high, but you divided by 3 and moved some zeros around and you could figure it out fairy quickly. $60 for some Pringles! Oh, no, that’s just $2, no problem! Hong Kong is about 8/1 HKD to USD, so a soda costs $8 HKD, but it’s really only a buck. Currency conversions are a great way to exercise your brain muscles! Currency exchanges are a way to frustrate them. We lost about $1 when we converted our Japanese Yen to New Taiwan Dollars. When we converted from Taiwan to Hong Kong dollars we lost about $8. A bigger sting! We’re trying to spend all the cash we get out in every country to avoid these fees, but sometimes you can’t, and so we’re learning the hard way how to properly convert our cash.
Moving on, while we were in Taiwan they celebrated Double Ten Day (October 10th), the day the uprising against the Qing Dynasty began, which lead to the Republic of China being formed. It’s a Taiwanese national holiday. We stayed about a block from the Taiwanese president’s palace and on October 9th we visited the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, which is a sight to be seen. The memorial itself has a museum and art gallery inside of it and is a monolith of a building. Incredibly beautiful and clean. A big tourist attraction. We witnessed the changing of the guard (picture below). I won’t get into politics here, but Chaing Kai-shek was a prominent figure in Taiwa. It’s controversial which country owns the island or not.
When we’re visiting a place we want to dig into the culture and experience the why and how of the location. We are history museum lovers (I also enjoy art museums, Jason not as much). In Taiwan, we tried to go to two museums that were either closed for the day or permanently closed. Big bummer! Jason wanted to see the Miniatures Museum, but if there’s a government holiday on a Monday then museums are closed the following Tuesday. Whoops!
Taiwan had a World Religion Museum, which I was very interested in, but when we trounced through the heavy rain to the museum’s destination we discovered its doors were shut and signs in Chinese out front seemed to say, “Closed!” OK, not great, but we got some lunch and then visited a beautiful temple where we did our own world religion studies in Taoism before heading home. Taiwan seemed to have the most active religious community thus far, with worshipers chanting and lighting candles while we were onsite. It was a sight to see!
The museum we did get to see was the National Taiwan Museum, established in 1908, and considered the Louvre of the East because of its extensive art collection. We wanted to see a piece of jade carved into the shape of pork belly. A pork fat tribute! We didn’t find this piece, but we found so many other treasures that it didn’t matter. The museum has a garden attached where you can feed coi and birds food pellets. The continuous dreary rain didn’t keep us from playing in the park! Fish and waterfowl don’t mind a little downpour, so why should we? While there I saw my first black swan pair. The mother was clearly nesting and unpleased that I wanted to feed her. The father was ungrateful for my food as well. Suit yourselves, the ducks and coi like it! Check this out!
Taiwan was tough. I came in not feeling well, with little sleep and a bad attitude, and walked into a smelly situation and a crappy AirBnB. There was little bright side that I could see, but I just wasn’t looking properly. In the end, I loved Taiwan’s character and how the people were more real than Japan and Korea. The rules were looser and so were the people’s attitudes. The food was hit or miss, but when it hit it was a hit out of the park! No middle ground here. And, despite the rain, I learned that you can’t let a little weather get in the way of your adventure. Live once, live it well, and if it takes you a little longer to get up in the morning to make sure you live it, then so be it.
A few more pictures for the road from Taiwan!
