So, this is it. The first day of the rest of my life!
Just kidding. I have to leave in eight days. So sad.
I’ve had a pretty excellent time in the one day since the plane landed (actually, less than that — I didn’t get too much sleep last night and exchanged it for a nice first day full of doing things).
I haven’t had a haircut in a long time, and the humidity is too much for any poor weak American hair product I might’ve packed to be able to handle, so my hairstyle’s already changed. One step toward evolving into my final form of world traveler with zero insecurity.
This isn’t exactly a Taipei city review — that’s something I can do later if I get the opportunity and have the desire — and most of the travel I did today was in New Taipei City / Xinbei anyway, so I haven’t really seen all that life in the great capital has to offer.
The first thing that I did today was go to 阜杭豆漿 Fuhang Soy Milk, which I had never heard of but realized their status when I found that Seven-Eleven apparently sells and brands their flagship product. Seems like I was the only one who had never heard of it!
As was to be expected, they were running a very efficient business. The person sitting across from me was a vlogger, which was an interesting thing to see. She had a microphone out and a camera pointed at the food and was making a YouTube video right there in front of me.
Not that I’m any better, because I took a picture, too:
It was excellent, I’m not going to lie. It’s the only soy milk restaurant / Taiwanese breakfast joint that I’ve ever seen, so I didn’t have a benchmark in mind, but it was definitely better than any fast-food breakfast I’ve had in the US, and it was only $85 NT (a friend gave me the bit of the 油條 for free).
After that, I went back to the hotel room and made myself a cup of coffee using the complimentary kettle, which got really hot near the wall jack that had the loose connection and certainly didn’t fill me with confidence. It hasn’t started a fire yet, and it’s not too late to alert the hotel staff who’re at the front desk about three steps from my hotel room door…
沒事吧。
One of my professors and our tour group went together on a tour that the professor had scheduled, so in the morning we went to the 野柳地質公園 Yehliu Geography Park, which I had never heard of. I didn’t take the obligatory photo of the queen’s head rock formation because we got that as a group, but I got some nice landscapes:
This was just to the left of the 女王頭. It didn’t have a tourist path right behind it, so I was able to get a legitimately nice-looking photo (the path in the background adds some interest, anyway). This looks like a macOS wallpaper! I expect some Taiwanese beauty in the Apple stock collection soon.
I felt the desperate urge to take this photo after standing outside in the 90 percent humidity for over an hour. It’s a wonder nobody was trying to swim in there…
Really, I got used to it after a while, anyway — it isn’t as bad as somebody who likes to complain would have you believe.
We popped back on to the National Highway No. 1 afterward to get some views in at 九份 Jiufen, which was a nice turn to the other end of the oceanfront-wetness-to-mountain-breeze spectrum. It seems like I wasn’t the only one who felt that way:
We got lunch there, and there was this neat bird sitting to my right on a pole in front of a pretty excellent mountain view.
All of these landscapes are made even more beautiful by the humidity so intense that it’s visible — that’s just the Formosa fog. Apparently, everyone here lives inside a Playstation 1.
We shopped around at stores for a little bit, and then left to 平溪 Pingxi to do the same thing. The center shopping road has train tracks running through the middle, and after messing around with writing on a fire balloon for a while, taking some pictures with it, and then launching it, the train actually came — I hadn’t been expecting that, so it was funny when the person helping us with the fire balloon started wildly waving her hand away from the tracks right after we launched it.
Fortunately, we avoided the rain the whole time we were outside, and it picked up on the way back to Taipei. I think it’s up now, but when I first walked back in to my hotel room I was prepared with my raincoat and the shoulder-strap bag that I had bought at one of the stores covered in the characters of my favorite writing system. Clearly, the people here have excellent taste in both graphic design and phonetics.
My group partners for the project that brought me here in the first place told me raincoats weren’t stylish, but they’ll have to reconsider when they see me in this.
I might need to lay down and prepare for that job interview I still haven’t finished the recording for before we go to eat out tonight. Being that we’re staying on 信義路 Xinyi Rd, that’s at 鼎泰豐 Din Tai Fung (Ding Tai Feng).
It may also be a while before I really come back with a lot more content to share, because I anticipate being pretty busy — that’ll be good because I’ll spend a lot of time collecting neat info and not blogging, and I’ll come back in about a week with a big blog post to share. Now might really be the time to become an Internet city reviewer!
謝謝光臨！
I’m going to pop over to a 小七.