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.