Happy New Year from Taipei

All my friends and family who read this blog and those who don't as well, I wish you all a very happy new year and hope that the year to come is filled with good things for everyone.

I watched the fireworks tonight fly out of Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world according to many, standing on a downtown street in Taipei surrounded by thousands of people who had come from all over Taiwan and in some cases the world. I headed down there with a large group from the hostel which became somewhat segmented leading up to the fireworks display. It was a fitting crowd with which to spend my first New Years Eve outside the US. Japan, Canada, Korea, Australia, the US and other countries were all represented and so fitting with the company I've been keeping these last few months as I traveled. Although I was not really up for a giant evening drinking, I was happy tonight and did enjoy the company and the fireworks display. As I watched it, I reflected on the things I've done for the last 3 months and I am pretty pleased with all I have seen and experienced. This was a more challenging thing than I anticipated and I have learned a lot. I have also met interesting people and made new friends from all over the world. I feel very fortunate and grateful for having had this chance to travel this way and see just one more piece of this amazing world we live in. Miss you all and will you see one day again soon.

I did not fall into the abyss

A few have inquired so fear not, I have survived what I believe is my first earthquake without even realizing it was an earthquake at the time. For those of you who didn't know, an earthquake struck off the coast of southern Taiwan I think a few days ago. I heard it was a 7.something on the Richter scale but it wasn't that strong here in Hualien. I was upstairs in my room at the hostel sitting on my bed and there had been some wind that evening so I'd been hearing that quite a bit outside buffeting against the building and then I looked up and it seemed as if the room was shaking quite a bit. I thought at first the building was rocking from the wind somehow but then that seemed impossible. My second guess was that I was having a seizure of some kind and that my head was about to blow off my shoulders like the famous scene in Scanners, but that didn't happen either. It lasted a few seconds and I went downstairs briefly afterwards and was informed that the earth had in fact quaked. Alas, no steaming fissures opened up in the earth into which parked cars fell, horns blaring in their death throes. Neither did buildings collapse. Mostly I was just confused.

I spent the last few days wandering around Hualien visiting various temples and otherwise wandering the streets here. In the evenings I spent some time with three visitors who had arrived not long ago here at the hostel, one American guy at the beginning of a 5 month around-the-world trip and two English folks taking a brief vacation trip to Taiwan before they return to Chiang Mai, Thailand where they are currently living and studying the Thai language as part of a university program back in England in Southeast Asian studies. They'll be spending a year abroad and then returning to England for two more years of study there. They're all nice and we went out to dinner the last few nights, yesterday in particular being our chance to try the Pakistani restaurant here in town which had tasty food though the menu was certainly a bit atypical. The curry was tasty but none of the standard vegetarian items such as chickpeas, lentils, or even potatoes. It was an enjoyable change of pace though. That Pakistani fellow who runs the restaurant has been living here for 14 years. His friend brought him here to Taiwan originally and in fact owns a Pakistani and Indian restaurant in Taipei where I am pretty sure I've eaten. Last night after dinner we ventured into a billiards place and played a few games as the people around us stared, mostly at the white girl and at the white guys not so much.

A word about personal space. I have noticed throughout my travel that the notion of personal space isn't so much observed here. People pass much more closely to each other and touch each other on a regular basis, or so it seems to me. But that's not so much my point. The notion of personal space extends to vehicles as well. Also between vehicles and people. Since vehicles here drive on the sidewalks on a disturbingly regular basis, there is much more occasion for interaction between the two. So quite often I see people come very close to being obliterated by an oncoming or rear-approaching truck and nobody seems to stop and reflect that they almost just died. So far I haven't seen anyone get creamed but it seems like it most only be a matter of time. Bill Hicks talked about the pedestrian-right-of-way law in California. He said I'd like to see them try that in New York. We just step on the gas and turn on the wipers.

Hualien and Taroko Gorge

It has been an interesting day. I walked 14 miles along a river through a giant gorge with marble cliffs rising hundreds of feet on either side of me. Before I get to that though, let me just say that I think the shower here at the Amigos hostel in Hualien, Taiwan is the most powerful in all of east Asia. I haven't been to all of east Asia yet, but I'm pretty sure this is going to be it. Like most of the showers here it is of the handheld nozzle variety but unlike most which if they were dropped would lay inert on the shower floor, this one if released would violently fly around the room like a firehose or an angry cobra. Also, the spray is insanely wide. It must have a 3 foot diameter at arms length. It's a good thing the showers here are self-contained, because there is no way I would have been able to avoid dousing the entire bathroom including the toilet paper which is a major hostel faux pas of course. The pressure itself is not unlike the black market shower head purchased by Kramer in episode 126 of the hit series Seinfeld entitled "The Shower Head" which was intended for use cleaning elephants at the circus. But I digress.

So Taroko Gorge was pretty impressive. I took a bus from the train station here in Hualien to a town or sort of service area called Tiensiang a ways into the gorge itself. A road runs through the gorge along the river with various divergences onto trails and other explorable areas. Upon reaching Tiensiang I simply walked the whole way back to the park entrance, apparently about 14 miles but it went by very fast and only took about 4 hours. I don't even see how that's possible, maybe it isn't really that far or I just walk fast, but I felt like I was meandering quite a bit. I may return in the next few days to go explore some trails at greater length, I was informed that I probably wouldn't have time to do that and still walk the entire way. The alternatives to walking by the way were tour buses that give you a limited amount of time to linger in any given point of interest and of course an extremely limited view of your surroundings as you go. The weather was wonderful today so that was great, probably mid-60s and a bit of variance depending on whether I was in the sun or not. I feel pretty good, I'm going to try to find a vegetarian restaurant tonight to fill up, last night I had to wing it at a noodle place that worked out fine but was a hearkening back to the "wing it" days of mainland China. I guess I've been spoiled a little bit by the large number of all-vegetarian restaurants I've encountered here in Taiwan. I also a couchsurfing couple I need to call and perhaps I'll hang out with them. I'm thinking right now of staying in Hualien til Saturday and just riding the train back to Taipei then in time for New Years on Sunday night. This is a nice and laid-back place and it'll give me a chance to go back to the gorge and do a few other things of interest in town before heading back.

I have realized that this would be a great place to do a roadtrip but alas I didn't take the time before I left to get an international driver's permit which is alas required here to rent a vehicle. It's just a mail-in application to the AAA but I didn't have time to do it before I left. I will try to get that together before I come back to Taiwan because the coasts are beautiful and filled with things that are virtually unreachable without your own transport. It would be like trying to travel the Pacific Coast Highway in California on public transportation, it just can't really work. Speaking of public transportation, I was the main attraction on the way back to Hualien tonight when a gang of maybe 40 school kids around 10 years old all got on the bus to go home from school. I guess the public bus is the school bus here. They were talking to me and making faces at my accent, though I did ask the kid next to me if the french fries he was eating were good. The answer was yes, they were good.

Besides that, I'm still alive. Hope all are well.

now Kaohsiung

I'd say so far in about half of the internet cafes in Taiwan smoking is allowed and in others it is not. Also, it seems really common here to have food and drinks available, sometimes with a kitchen. You have to buy at least 30 NTD worth of stuff besides your internet time. One extra way to make money I guess. The rest is the same, 99% of people playing games 24 hours a day and always full.

The second half of my stay in Tainan was pretty fun. I met up with Susan the couchsurfer who turned out to be Buddhist and vegetarian. We had dinner that night and the following night at two good vegetarian restaurants. When we met up near her work she arrived on a motor scooter so I got my first ride on the back of one of those through Tainan. Much better Tainan than Taipei or Kaohsiung, I'll tell you that. It was pretty fun and I'd say that I only had a few moments of close-my-eyes-and-hope-for-the-best. Needless to say I survived. Next stop will be driving one myself, though I think I can't do that just yet, I need an international driver's permit. I'm on it. Anyway, I hung out with Susan and spoke as much Chinese as I could though her English was pretty good so that helped with translation as necessary and also with me being lazy as also necessary. My last day I took a long-ass walk all the way to the town of Anping near to Tainan. There's a lot of old streets out there, a few temples, a large formerly Dutch fort that has been completely replaced except for a few walls, and various other interesting scenery. I'll let the pictures speak on that, which are actually up by the way. I'll put those links at the end.

Kaohsiung may not be for me. It's a big city, the 2nd biggest in Taiwan, and it is more like Taipei than Tainan, but it is substantially dirtier and less interesting based on my limited experience. It is not without its moments and admittedly my initial impression has been marred by the fact that I do not know anyone here and have thus been on my own since arrival sans the occasional meeting with a stranger. On the bright side, I am either really lucky or there are a zillion vegetarian restaurants here. They are all Chinese and Buddhist so far, but I haven't even had to look at all. Within a few blocks of my hotel I found 5 different ones by accident. It's kind of remarkable. The people running them and dining in them seem to be very friendly and have all offered to help me with the menu and otherwise been chatty about where I'm from. Last night at a buffet I met a Taiwanese group, the daughter of whom has been studying in Pittsburgh for a Masters degree. She was just back to visit her family and have a vegetarian hotpot apparently. Anyway, I walked down the Love river which runs through the center of Kaohsiung and then down into interesting but gritty residential and industrial areas near the water. Kaohsiung is a port city and there is a lot of seafront scenery with varying degrees of grunginess. I found my way to a ferry pier which I took over to Qijin island, visiting a long street of seafood snacks with the occasional small temple, a lighthouse up on a hill with a pleasant if smoggy view of Kaohsiung, and Qijin beach with a nice sunset and a strange black sand. I think it is geologic in nature and not pollution or anything before anybody gets grossed out. Later that evening I visited the Liouhe night market and wandered the street watching people and eyeballing snacks though I was too full from my prior feast to participate. There were in fact a few all vegetarian snack stands. Today was spent at Lotus Pond. That's about a 15 minute train ride north of Kaohsiung in Zuoying. It was really beautiful and surprisingly empty considering it is Saturday. I thought it was a really nice place to spend the day and the weather was again beautiful. I think I may have even gotten a bit sunburned. So these excursions out of the heavily urban center of Kaohsiung have been enjoyable but I think after my trip to the Foguangshan monastery tomorrow I'll be plenty ready to move on out of here.

Briefly, I have had many occasions to witness the Chinese tourist picture-taking technique, which consists of locating a thing which can be a famous monument, body of water, other interesting visa, or in some cases a sign indicating you have arrived at the visa, and then taking turns while every person gets a picture of themselves taken in front of that thing. Sometimes people pair up. This is usually a hands-at-the-side or clasped-in-front pose. Occasionally the "peace/victory sign" is involved. As far as I can tell it is proof of having been at the destination. It only becomes inconvenient when obstructing all passing traffic. Additionally, it just seems like just nobody lets anybody else go here. Maybe it is like that in New York too and I just forgot, but I have seen not a single person hold a door for anyone else, or when getting off a bus actually pause and let the person in the row in front of you who has been waiting go. On the street whether on foot or on a scooter or a car, nobody seems that concerned about consideration to their fellow man. Maybe I'm generalizing, but I really haven't seen one single instance and I've seen plenty of cutting off, cutting lines, shoving people to get on trains, total lack of mutual respect. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, but they are still exceptions and apparently not the rule.

Here are pictures from Taipei and Tainan.

Tainan

I have arrived in Tainan, the 4th largest city in Taiwan and the former capital during imperial times. I had originally intended to go down the east coast of the island first stopping in the area of Taroko Gorge, but due to rain this week in that region I decided to instead head here by train, about a 4 hour ride from Taipei, where I have successfully located the sun. I will hop around a few cities in the south now where the weather is nice and hopefully by the time I am ready to return next week sometime, the weather on the east coast will have cleared up and I can spend time there on the way back to Taipei. I'd like to be back up there for 12/31 so I can do something interesting on New Years Eve, then fly back on 1/3 to Hong Kong.

Tainan is a nice city so far. I arrived late yesterday afternoon. The city has fewer tall buildings and feels more relaxed to me than Taipei. There is still a decent amount of people and vehicle traffic, many shops and restaurants as in Taipei, and overall it does not feel vastly different, just a smaller and more laid-back version of the capital where I've spent my time up until now. There are a zillion temples here, each interesting in its own way. Some Buddhist, Taoist, and even a Confucian Temple. There are also old forts usually 300-400 years old or so, usually built by the Chinese on top of the ruins of old Dutch structures from the time of that occupation. All that usually remains of the Dutch buildings is a wall here or there. Tomorrow I'm going to head to the site of the oldest fort which like most of the Dutch forts isn't really there anymore and has had something built on top of it, but is apparently an interesting historical site nonetheless. This is apparently Taiwan's oldest city and some of the streets do have a more quaint charm than I found in Taipei, though when I return to Taipei after this I still need to walk around the oldest neighborhood there and I'm sure I'll find similar scenery.

The people here have been slightly more curious about me than in Taipei. Up there foreigners are a dime a dozen. You don't see quite as many as in Hong Kong, but locals are largely indifferent. Down here I attract more looks though still nothing like in mainland China. I'm sure there must be some concentration of foreigners here, but I've actually yet to see a white face in the 24 hours I've been in town. I met a Japanese guy in the hostel ($8USD per night) and we went last night to a night market and then an old lit-up street where there was actually not much going on but we walked back through the city which was nice. I did encounter two friendly people almost immediately, one who offered directions simply because I looked lost, another who gave me directions and then found me 5 minutes down the road and offered to take me where I wanted to go on her motorbike. It was pretty amazing, I don't think it would happen in Taipei but who knows. There are many snack places out on the sidewalks as there are in Taipei and various restaurants and shops and pubs sprinkled throughout the city. All the sidewalks are covered as they are in Taipei and they are always unpredictable, sometimes disappearing so you have to walk in the street, sometimes turning into an outdoor seating area for a restaurant, sometimes turning into a kitchen, other times a parking lot. Sometimes several of these things at the same time. Walking around today was great, the sun was out and the weather was beautiful and I mostly wandered through the city from temple to temple and fort to fort, stopping only for a giant bowl of noodles at a vegetarian restaurant. There are a decent number here but nowhere near as dense as Taipei where I'm convinced there must be hundreds of completely vegetarian restaurants. Tonight I'm supposed to meet up with a couchsurfer who lives here for dinner, but she is still at work at the moment so I have found myself in an internet cafe typing this.

My hostel here has a curfew of 12am and then they lock the doors which kind of works out well. I'm not out for super late nights and I'm not sure during the week there are any real super late nights to be had, so being out until around then and going to bed shortly thereafter should work well for getting me back onto a reasonable schedule. With a computer in Joy's apartment I had gone back a little bit towards my New York City night owl ways and today I actually managed to get up and get out at a reasonable hour which I was excited to do anyway both for the nice weather and because it is the first day I have walked around a new city in a new while.

Hope everyone is doing well wherever you all are.

10 days in Taipei

Apparently the scores to the complete works of Mozart are now available online for free. In related news, the garbage trucks in Taipei play Beethoven's Fur Elise as they drive around. As it turns out, so do the garbage trucks in Iran. Apparently in some countries it is the theme for ice cream delivery rather than garbage pickup.

I saw two live Taiwanese bands the other night at a music club here in Taipei. A club where live music is played is called a "Live House" here, which I mention only because I have encountered the term a lot and had no idea what people were talking about. I thought it referred to some sort of electronic music genre presumably with even more bass drum than any one person can reasonably handle. I jest, I have the utmost respect for those who can mix two different songs together in order to create a smooth transition between them while simultaneously wearing sunglasses. So the first band was quite bad, sort of your average high school quality vaguely rock-like band, but the second band was substantially better, probably moreso than the average rock show I've seen in New York, or let's say at least as good as. Both bands sang in Mandarin and on Wednesday night there were about 30-40 people in the place at least some of who were friends but not bad considering in China they don't even really have venues for that sort of thing outside of Shanghai and Beijing. Apparently there are maybe 5 places or so in Taipei to see live music. I hope I can catch a metal show before I depart, I really need to experience something heavy and screamed in Chinese.

It has been raining here for a few days. We've managed to go out despite that. I went to a karaoke place with Joy yesterday. It's a pretty serious enterprise here. The place we went is across the street from her apartment and the lobby is like a nice hotel with chandeliers and soft chairs and marble floors. You go to the front desk as if you were checking in, then they direct you upstairs where you are led into a private room with a large flatscreen tv, a computer interface to the karaoke machine, large sofa, table, menu for food and drinks, and your own bathroom attached to the room. The entire building can hold 1800 people and places like this are quite commonplace. It would appear they take their karaoke very seriously here though the English song selection was slightly more limited than one finds in New York but of course that's to be expected. First stop today is a giant vegetarian buffet which I'm kind of excited about. I actually have been doing a lot of winging it at local restaurants rather than visiting explicitly vegetarian places just due to circumstances of meeting up with Joy and her friends to hang out, though I have done fine. Every place here is very vegetarian friendly and getting food is no problem. Even at 7-11 they had a rice ball with soy tuna or something inside, which actually tasted disturbingly like tuna and yet somehow was not.

Joy is around through the weekend and currently planned to leave Monday. I believe I'll be transferring back to the hostel for a night or maybe two to organize my trip down to Taroko Gorge which isn't really too big of a deal, I just need to sort out where to stay once I arrive and the best way to actually explore the gorge itself which is decently huge. I'm kind of excited, the scenery on the way down there and in that area is supposed to be extremely beautiful. It's only about a 2-3 hour train ride from Taipei and it is supposed to be a nice ride. I'll probably go down the east coast to the southern tip of the island and then turn around and come back up the west coast. I'll have just about two weeks to do that before coming back and spending New Years in Taipei, my first out of the US. Not exactly sure what I'm doing yet but I'm going to try to watch the fireworks that they shoot out of Taipei 101, the tallest building in Taiwan and actually in the world depending on which test the countries are using that day to decide. Since I am feeling better, I will probably start planning my onward journey soon since I have spent plenty of time in Hong Kong now and don't need to linger there once my return ticket drops me off. I'll probably stay only a night there before moving on to a new country yet again, but where will that be...?

A few days into Taipei

Things are starting to make a bit more sense. I have navigated many a city in my travels with only a map to guide me and generally it is something I consider myself to be good at, but no city has confounded those efforts the way Taipei did initially. I'm starting to realize a bit better now why that is and find my destinations with a bit less effort. There are in fact names for the streets here, so that is a good starting point, but those streets are often not labeled in a clear and consistent way, so figuring out what street I'm on is an exercise unto itself. Next, streets often have sub-streets called lanes which can be numbered very high, in the case of Joy's apartment, it is on Lane 164 of a street I managed to find. Some addresses such as those I have found for vegetarian restaurants are further numbered with an alley as well, which is presumably a smaller turn off of a lane. The streets themselves are usually numbered with a section, and then of course to add a third dimension to the problem, restaurants and any other destinations will typically be found not on the first floor. In New York and many other cities restaurants will usually be located on the first floor or maybe "upstairs" but generally visible from the street. In Taiwan and in much of China, Japan, and other countries I've visited here, a restaurant may in fact be on the 7th or 10th or 14th floor of a building with perhaps a small sign in the front verifying its existence, or perhaps not. So you end up with addresses like this vegetarian restaurant I wish to visit later: #8, Alley 54, Lane 118, Heping E Rd Section 2, 1st Floor. If you listen carefully you can hear the database design for MoreThanSalad weeping.

So I figured out my way to a few different places now. I spent my two days here walking around and visiting a few major destinations within the city limits, some that I'd already seen but wished to see again and others that were new or for the purpose of getting food somewhere. The major destinations were the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall and Taipei 101, the two buildings that I think most define Taipei for me just for their distinctive look and size. I ventured hither and fro on the subway which is quite efficient although as mentioned before the maps within are not always intuitive but enough sense was made to get where I wanted to go. The first day I was on my own mostly though I met a number of people at the hostel with whom I chatted, primarily in Mandarin as they were largely Taiwanese. There was one Vietnamese fellow who has been studying in Taiwan for under a year and speaks Mandarin really well, such that it is hard to believe how short of a time it has been since he began learning the language. I met a few girls here from Taichung who were working at an electronics exposition at the World Trade Center here and invited me to go check it out, so I went to take a look as it was free. It was absolute and utter chaos. I have been similar things in the US before though perhaps mostly trade shows which are a little different. I know sex sells but there is just something absurd about 5 barely clothed Taiwanese girls doing a fully choreographed dance number right out of a Britney Spears video in the booth of a company selling cellphones and laptops. Microsoft had a scantily clad young lady onstage handing out prizes to eager onlookers while a salesman gave a demonstration of the new version of Windows on a giant projection. Most of the booths with the largest crowds had an attractive and pretty much naked woman shouting into a megaphone attempting to outshout the woman at the booth ten feet away. Millions of people roamed in every direction. I didn't last too long there but it was pretty entertaining and I'm glad I went. The people I met at the hostel who were there work for a company called Jordan English which helps kids learn English. I visited with them briefly but they were kind of busy so I wandered and let them try to find customers which couldn't have been easy since they all had clothes on.

I spent time yesterday walking around with a Canadian-born Chinese girl I met at the hostel who has spent the last 10 months teaching English in Korea. She had 4 days off from class and decided to take a quick trip to Taiwan to make the most of it. We took a walk in the afternoon and ventured out at one point to a river where there was a sort of path on which we could walk for a bit at night which was sort of nice but I have a feeling going back there during the day would be better. Turns out that girl from Canada (Bonnie) uses Couchsurfing too and had made plans already to meet up with a local, so I joined them for dinner at a Japanese restaurant we sort of wandered upon. At first I thought I was going to be hosed but as it seems to be turning out, most restaurants in Taiwan are pretty darned vegetarian friendly. They actually had a completely vegetarian bowl of ramen which is something I usually find hard to get at Japanese restaurants in New York. Great success.

Today I woke up and checked out of the hostel and walked over to Joy's parents' apartment in Taipei where I am currently typing this. I'll be staying here for a while then who knows. Now, to get lunch and buy bananas. They're binding you know.

I am in Taipei

After two months or so of traveling in China, I have hit a new country. My intention is to spend the next 28 days here in Taiwan, a large chunk in Taipei probably and then some other period of time jumping around to other cities and visiting some of the many scenic parts of the island.

The hostel here is nice and it is for some reason I have yet to ascertain called Taiwanmex and the computer is in Spanish. Everyone who works here as far as I can tell is Taiwanese. The mystery deepens. My Mandarin seems to be coming back though I certainly feel a bit tentative after a few weeks in Hong Kong speaking largely English. Everyone here has been speaking Mandarin all night and my roommate is a Taiwanese guy on a business trip who doesn't speak much English according to him so we spoke only Chinese. I'm sure what little hesitation I feel will fade away swiftly. I did manage to score a vegetarian meal despite being the most confused about a street layout I have been in recent memory. There are all these lanes and sections here, and the real hard part is the streets do not seem to be consistently signposted in any way. Also, and I'm not making this up, in each subway station I visited there are multiple exits and occasional wall-posted maps to indicate where you will be when you leave via a certain exit. Every map I encountered, including those in the same station, was rotated to a different orientation. Sometimes North was up and right, other times it was down and left. Am I what the Governator would call a girly man for not being able to sort out which way I'm supposed to walk to get where the hell I'm trying to go? These problems aside, I found a vegetarian snack stall and ordered myself a cheap bowl of noodles, vegetables, and some sort of vegetarian meat for about $1USD. Nice to be back in a place where that is possible and easy, though I'm sure I could've done it in Hong Kong with a little bit of Cantonese at my disposal or a bit more bravery when it comes to making an ass of myself. I got over that quickly in mainland but I always had my Chinese ability to fall back on as I suppose I do here, so once again, it is ON.

My stay in Hong Kong was enjoyable. I do enjoy that city quite a bit though it is somewhat of a relief to be in Taipei in a way. Being able to speak the language is certainly a big part of it. Here I know that it will always be English or Mandarin and the likelihood of one or the other working is extremely high. In HK a lot of people spoke English and quite a few I encountered spoke Mandarin, but there was always a negotiation in the beginning of a conversation to determine which language I was better off using which always lent a certain apprehension to starting an actual conversation. Also, if I'm speaking English in a Chinese country I feel like a gringo and here it makes me happy to be able to conduct all my transactions more fluently and without forcing the other person to speak my language. Despite that, Hong Kong is a great city and I think in many ways I can call it a favorite in the world. Getting around is so easy, the mass transit system is just beautifully done and incredibly efficient. My last week there I finally purchased the Octopus card which enables the bearer to store money and then use that card to ride all mass transit including the MTR (subway), the buses, the double-decker electric tram, and all of the ferries of which there are many. Also the Airport Express train to and from the airport is covered. Now that's fairly cool, but what's really cool is you can use the Octopus card to purchase things at 7-11, Mcdonalds, and apparently other participating store chains. So you bring your stuff to the counter, the guy or gal rings it up, and you hold your card in front of a reader which beeps and you're done. No signing, no accepting the charges, just done. The card is based on radio frequencies not a magnetic strip, so you just hold it there, no swiping or anything like that. You often will see women holding their purses up to the reader, you don't even need to take it out of the bag or out of your wallet. So mass transit is great, plus you can walk pretty easily wherever you want to go within a particular island anyway. The density of stores, restaurants, shops, and people is all very high so there's rarely an uninteresting block. There are towering skyscrapers with exotic designs and in between them run tiny sidestreets with chaotic markets or larger avenues with designer stores and cafes. It's a tremendous mix of old and new as well as the occasional international influence. I saw restaurants with Indian food, Italian, French, American, lots of vegetarian of different styles of course, and many others. There are fancy places where you can spend hundreds of dollars and there are shops with only one kind of noodle soup for next to nothing.

I'll refrain for the moment from describing Taipei too much as I've just arrived tonight and have yet to really take a decent walk around the city. I was here a few years ago and it'll be interesting to see how my perception of the city has changed having now studied mandarin for a while and traveled in mainland China. My initial reaction has been positive. I'm happy to be somewhere new and on the move again and the streets on which I've strolled so far have all been very active and packed with a kind of activity and chaos that is a bit more unrestrained somehow than what I saw in Hong Kong and more like what I remember from Chinese cities. Also, I had some street food tonight for a snack after my noodle soup which is something in which I did not indulge too much in Hong Kong, perhaps because of the language barrier. Here of course I can ask any questions I like and if I don't understand the response, hey, at least I tried. I did understand in this case and scored a nice stick of grilled tofu which was "a little spicy" but my lips are still mildly numb. That dude is right on my street too. I have a feeling I'll be seeing him again. I wasn't too deterred by the pig blood and I think it was ducks' heads or something that were resting on the same rack of options. I have taken a practical approach to veganism here as I feel I must and I suppose as I always have. The bottom line is I have to eat so as long as I don't actually consume the meat I think my goal is fulfilled. I think it would be next to impossible to travel as I am and be a strict vegan even with complete fluency in the language.

So tomorrow I'll be getting up and exploring the city. The last time I was here was with Joy and her father who pretty much took care of everything and I didn't even have a map to guide me for lack of need. This time I've got a map and I'm sure by the end of tomorrow the city will be marginally less confusing to me than it was tonight. There's about a zillion vegetarian restaurants here so I think eating will pose no major problem. I am uploading some pictures from Kunming and my second stay in HK which should be up soon. Hope all y'all are well.