After a rough start just trying to get there, I finally made it to Taipei. In Taipei, I was able to get connected with an old connection of my parents: Linda. Linda and her husband Dave have been living in Taipei, Taiwan for 25 years. They very graciously invited me to stay with them while I was there. They picked me up from the shuttle, showed me to their place, gave me my own bedroom, and made me a sandwich. With how I’ve been living for the past month so far, I felt downright spoiled: a real bed that wasn’t just a half inch mattress on a piece of plywood, and my own private room! On top of that, they gave a me a set of keys to the place, so I was free to come and go whenever I pleased.
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| Shrimp Fishing |
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| Boggy |
While there, I was able to meet up with a couchsurfer host named Boggy, she picked me up on her scooter and showed me the largest night market in Taipei. Pretty much every city in China I had been in had one form of night market or another, but none of them compared to the scale of this one in Taipei. It was like a carnival. Besides the usual street merchants and huge plethora of street food, the market also had a variety of different carnival games. One that we played involved trying to pick up a shrimp with a small fishing poll and put them into a bucket. Then the ones you can get into the bucket, they’ll fry up for you to eat! We also tried some Taiwanese specialities: oyster omelet and duck blood soup.
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| Oyster Omelet and Duck Blood Soup |
Boggy also gave me a tour of her school where she was studying industrial design, where they develop concept designs with industrial applications. Which was really interesting.
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| Sky Lanterns |
However, there was one main reason I decided to add a stop in Taipei: The Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival. The end of the Spring Festival is marked with an occasion called “Lantern Festival.” In most cities in China, it is celebrated by making ornate lanterns and decorating entire cities with them. But in a rural district outside of Taipei called Pingxi, they have a slightly different tradition: celebrators write their wishes for the new year on to a lantern and release it to float off into the air, along with hundreds of other lanterns. The tradition is done in other locations as well, and when I was in Shanghai I was able to witness a few of them being set off, but they aren’t done anywhere near as many as they do in Pingxi.
When we arrived before dusk, people were already releasing their lanterns. Through out the night, there was a constant flow of lanterns into the sky, creating amazing patterns as the wind blew them around. About each hour, the main ceremony would release a batch of a couple hundred lanterns all at once, flying up into the air.
After we had gotten our fill of watching the lanterns, we went to release our own. With a little help from Lisi and a random Taiwanese girl, I was able to write my own wishes in traditional Chinese characters. Then we lit our lanterns and released them into the sky.
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| Taipei 101 Tower |
While also in Taiwan I made sure to visit the Palace Museum that holds some of the artwork that was taken from the Forbidden City to Taiwan during the revolution. I also took a ride up to the top of Taipei Tower, formally the world's tallest building and currently the fourth tallest. It was a interesting sensation to be at the top, and feel the building sway in the wind.
Taiwan offered and very nice break as I prepared for the next phase of my journey: South East Asia. I was a bit anxious about next country, Vietnam, with the negative things I had heard, and was a bit nervous the night before I left.
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