First day in Taipei

Check out this fantastic photo of our plane in the sunset which Jennifer captured. This is in Tokyo, as we were about to board our flight to Taiwan.


Oh ... the 12-hour flight from Minneapolis went well, thanks to this REI butt pad. On my previous two trips to Asia I was squirming after a couple hours, as if I were sitting on a crappy stock motorcycle seat. So I figured I'd try that there REI butt pad, and it worked great! No butt fatigue at all. It rolls down to less than the size of a can of pop, and I hardly have to put any air into it to be effective. A couple glasses of wine (because the beer on the plane is crap and makes me pee) and I managed to get some sleep when I wasn't reading Susan Collin's "Hunger Games" on my Nook. 

On our first day we were going to bum around in Taipei (more on that in later posts) and the first thing we saw was this memorial. We pulled in and it turns out it was Chiang Kai-shek's tomb and war memorials for other Taiwanese. 

I don't think there are many building codes in place in Taiwan, or they aren't observed if they exist. I'm all for moderate deregulation, but there some things which are best left for standards organizations to develop and the gov't to enforce. Note how the air conditioners are perched on ledges on the wall above ... and the electrical cables draped haphazardly between units. All of this is right over a busy sidewalk.

Scooters. Lots of scooters here, main the small-wheel variants. They carry all sorts of stuff, even people ;-) Most intersections have boxes painted on the street behind which cars must stop. The box are there for when the scooters filter through traffic at stoplights, and then they race (as much as a scooter can race) in front of traffic. The stoplights have countdown timers so we know how long the red light will last, and on the longer ones (two minutes) we'll see scooterati remove helmets, make phone calls, pet their dogs, eat fruit, drink some water, but the scooter up on a centerstand, etc. Scooters are by far the most efficient means of transportation and parking here, but also very dangerous.

Our first Taiwanese meal was dim sum. I love the steamed dumplings and buns ... I just can't get enough. Here at home I think there's a dim sum restaurant in Apple Valley ....