Day 7 -- The Type-A Taipei Adventure!

The day started normally enough. Waking up fairly early, and heading next door for breakfast. We have free breakfast at a sort of café place. I had French toast with ham, cheese, and turkey, and also this amazing thing. They called it a "yogurt cheese pastry."

Toast!

We then ventured to the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial via the subway. The public transportation in Japan and Taiwan are amazing. I don't understand why we don't have more widespread transit in the states. Anyway, the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial had a large open courtyard where many public events take place. In the very early morning, people apparently practice martial arts.

You can see how practicing Taichi here would be pretty cool

The memorial itself had two guards standing absolutely motionless. I have no idea how anybody stands like this for 10 minutes, let alone for hours.

After the memorial, we ventured into a sort of artist's alley where several different kinds of goods could be haggled over. I bought a few things, and drove some of the prices down, but I'm generally bad at that sort of thing. The art pieces were all pretty incredible, and I wanted to buy a lot more than I did, but I definitely couldn't have taken back a huge gold statue of Guan Yu holding his fabled Guandao. For myself I bought a little necklace with a stone drinking gourd on it. 

After the Jade market, we went to a 101 floor mall named Taipei 101. Everything in it screamed high class, that is, expensive. It's very hard for me to describe the enormity and swank of it all. I don't pretend to know anything about fashion, but I know this is where people who know fashion go, provided they have the money. We had lunch in the food court, which had everything from sit down restaurants to a McDonalds. We opted for fast food, since none of us really felt like going broke, though we all went different places. I'll admit, I went to McDonalds. I'm not exactly big on food, so even though we're trying lots of new food, I'm not exactly eager to step out of my comfort zones.

After lunch, we went and briefly spent time at the National Palace Museum. It was INSANELY crowded because of a certain holiday that made entrance free. We read a few interesting things about how certain tools were used, and some history about Jade use in tools, but it was very difficult to navigate with all of the people, and we shortly departed. Before we left, two of our group members invented the Taiwan bomb, which is a form of photobombing. You walk up, very obviously, next to someone, smile, and take a picture of yourself with them. It sounds like the kind of thing that could end badly, but the only one of us who can speak Chinese (Brandon) got something of a date out of it, which was very interesting.

For a while now, one of our group members has been asking about where to get a sword in Taiwan. We all kind of got caught up in it, and before we knew it most of us had swords. It probably seems kind of silly to most people, but now I have a sword that I can say "I got that while I was vacationing in Taiwan." We were all kind of worried about getting it through customs, but TSA guidelines say that you can transport a sword in your checked baggage, and we haven't been able to find anything about it in Taiwanese customs, other than the typical no transport of arms and munitions. Basically worst case scenario the swords are taken by customs. We all went alone, and Brandon helped us all ask questions and pay. The woman running the shop was very nice, and probably had a pretty good day, considering how many of us there were getting these.

Now we come to my favorite part of the day. This is where the real adventure started. As a preface, I speak almost no Chinese. Specifically, "Do you speak English," "excuse me," and "thank you." I also know the word "where." Well, being a fearless adventurer, I forged into the concrete wilderness, armed only with a desire to purchase a new phone charger and look at the electronics stores. In true adventurer fashion, I got extremely lost. Now it was never too bad, and I always could have asked someone to point me the right way, but there is absolutely no fun in that. But to back up a little bit, I did some exploring around our hotel and found an amazing bookstore that I highly recommend if you're ever in Taipei. I believe the name translates to "Stepping Stone Books," or something to that effect. They have very cool anime themed merchandise, reasonably priced electronics, and all manner of fun things. I actually ended up buying a portable battery that I can use to charge my phone for about 10 bucks. This was a lot more of an involved process than you might think. I was trying to ask the store clerks if the voltage would be okay for my phone. Try to imagine conveying that kind of idea without the use of words. Rather than play charades, I simply asked the clerk if he spoke English. He didn't, but he DID speak some Japanese. It was going very well, right up until the very end where he was trying to explain the difference between two different batteries. He was trying to say that one would hold more charge, but the way he described it sounded like there was a problem and that it wouldn't work. He resorted to getting a different clerk who spoke flawless English, who very quickly explained everything. After the bookstore I searched in vain for NOVA (the electronics super market), then finally gave up and attempted to go home. NOVA is very obvious by the way, and literally was in about the only place I didn't look. While I was walking around, I stumbled upon a street that had tons of camera stores. These stores have parts for pretty much every camera there is, as well as having most of the newer camera models, all reasonably priced. It was interesting, but didn't help me get back at all. In fact, I only got back on a pure whim, because I was trying to use landmarks near the hotel, but on an absolute "what's down this road?" idea, I ended up finding our hotel. There was a rather large KFC on our hotel's street that I had no idea was there, which totally threw me off.

Anyway, after a long night of meandering, I simply crashed.