Taipei, A to Z

After a two-week delay, I’m finally bringing you an update on my short trip to Taiwan. I’m borrowing this format from a dear friend. I like that it’s short and simple. Besides, who doesn’t love the alphabet?

(By the way, more photos can be found at my Flickr set.)

So here we go:

A: Asparagus juice!

B: Bubble tea. I haven’t had any since my internship in New York, and, since the stuff was developed in Taiwan, I felt this was a good time to drink it again. It had milk in it along with the tapioca pearls; I’m probably getting a kidney stone as we speak.

C: Chopstick skills. Emily, my traveling companion, and I learned how to cut noodles using our chopsticks. It started at the Peking Duck place; we got soup, and the woman serving it used her chopsticks to cut the noodles. Emily and I decided on the spot that we, too, needed such a skill and promptly started practicing. (It took a bit. The waitress, seeing our troubles refilling our soup bowls, hurried over to help us several times. But in the end, we conquered the noodles.)

D: Danshui. It’s the stop at the end of Taipei’s MRT line. We wandered along the riverside boardwalk, watched Chinese flamenco dancers and saw pigs in the street.










E: Eating. I think it’s the national pastime of Taiwan; I don’t think we ate anything we didn’t like. We barely made a dent in the duck, though.

F: Face masks! The hotel gave them to us when we checked in. Emily models one.

Lovely, isn't she?

G: Giant mammoth. As we were wandering through Chaing Kai-shek Memorial Hall, we heard a bunch of people laughing. They were dragging along a mammoth balloon.

Emily had fun with him.

He was a bit deflated, though.

H: HEAT! We saw one sign with 37 degrees Celsius. That’s a cool 98 Fahrenheit. Fine when you’re inside; not so when you’re wandering around the city.


I: Ice Monster, which is where we ate giant plates of shaved ice. It’s like a sno-cone on steroids: shaved ice topped with mango, condensed milk, and some syrupy stuff. But it’s perfect for those brutally hot days -- I really did feel cooler after eating it.

Now, why don’t they have this in Hong Kong?

J: Jade in unusual shapes, seen at the National Palace Museum. Among them: cabbage and a slab of meat. (I told you eating was the national pastime, right?)

K: Kindness. Everyone we met was so warm and friendly. The loveliest person was perhaps Grace, an English0speaking guide at Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. She came up to us after the changing of the guard ceremony and asked if she could explain Taiwan’s history. Then, when it was over, she gave us gifts. Again, why don’t they have this in Hong Kong?

L: Lin, the crazy cab driver. Who taught us the following:

“Taiwan tea, No. 1
Taiwan Beer, No. 2
Taiwan dumpling, No. 3.”

Chinese tea - “not too good, not too bad, so-so.” Or, in Mandarin, “mamahuhu.” (I googled it; it means “horse-horse-tiger-tiger.” But I don’t see how that translates to “so-so.” )

He also had some rather interesting things to say about Americans and Japanese. I’m glad to be the former, at least during that cab ride.

M: Motorcycles. Everyone rides them. At intersections, they all congregate at the front of the line during red lights, so it looks like a city of dueling biker gangs.


N: Night Markets. We started at Shilin, the most famous one. It was lively when we got there, then, a few minutes later, the merchants started hiding their stuff. The street went from packed to empty in three minutes. A few stalls away, a police officer was writing a woman a ticket. We asked someone about this a bit later, and she said it happens several times a night. The police station is just around the corner.

O: Oolong tea. It’s particularly famous, though not my favorite. We had it once: at a shop owned by a friend of Lin, the vivacious cabdriver. He took us there. After all, “Taiwan tea No. 1!” We paid way too much, but it was a good story to start the trip.

P: Pepper pork buns. Perhaps the best thing I ate in Taiwan. I saw the long line at the Shilin Night Market.

Q: Question: What service vehicle sings in Taiwan? Garbage trucks. We first heard them coming up from the MRT station. Our immediate thought: ice cream! Boy, were we surprised.

R: Red bean dumplings. Yum.

S: Space. There’s a lot of it. Or perhaps it just feels that way, coming from Hong Kong. One of the first things we noticed on the ride into the city from the airport was how short the buildings were. And how much sky was visible.

Even the MRT stations had high ceilings and a lot of room!

T: Temples. Taipei has some lovely ones! The colors are always so bright, the deities so full of character. We walked through one of the largest, Longshan, at night. It was filled with people lighting incense and praying. Outside, a “cleansing waterfall.”

U: Unesco family day. Which got us into a fort in Danshui for free.

V: Very long lines. They mean good food. They led us to pepper pork buns, after all. And there was a long, long line at Din Tai Fung. Both were totally worth the wait.

W: World’s tallest building (for now), Taipei 101.


Among its cool features, the world’s fastest elevator (85 floors in 35 seconds. It takes a minute to get to the top floor in my apartment building: the 6th.); the “super big wind damper,” which stabilizes the building during typhoons and earthquakes...

... some cool mascots known as the damper babies...

... and the coolest mailboxes I’ve ever seen (you can also add your own “postmark” with Taipei 101 rubber stamps...).

Also, some kick-ass views of Taipei.

X: Xaiolongbao, or “soup dumplings.” Eaten at Din Tai Fung, perhaps the most popular tourist destination in Taipei.

They were so good, we went there twice.

Y: I’m skipping Y, dammit. I’ve done all the hard letters until now!

Z: Z’s. We may not have gotten enough, but we were back at the hotel and thinking about sleep about the time one of us would have been on deadline. The hazards of packing in so much in so short a time…