10/12 Taiwan

Today is the day we are doing Taiwan on our own! We dock a little early, and head down to the gangway at about 8:30. Didn’t think we could get off yet, but they’re letting us go – so we’re outta here! Head across the street to the Post to use the ATM and it won’t give us any money. Tried 2 of the machines and they went all the way through the transaction, even gave us a receipt, but no cash. A message pops up saying the system is down or something. Crap! So did it really debit our account for 2000 Taiwan dollars? Twice? Guess we’ll find out. This has not been a good trip for ATM usage that’s for sure!

Headed off to the train station hoping they take credit cards. They do – and we’re on the 9:25 train to Tapei. A local that takes 45 minutes, but gets us to the main train station without much fuss. Clean, nice trains that look more like subway cars, than passenger trains. The main station is right in the middle of town – near the shopping areas and a little ways from Peace Park.

After getting thoroughly confused getting out of the train station, we finally got our bearings and headed off to find Lungshan Temple. The girl at the information counter told us to take the subway – too long a walk. But we don’t have any Taiwan dollars, so taking the subway isn’t happening. Plus, we really wanted to walk so we could see the city and experience the culture a bit.

Surprisingly enough, all the street signs are in Chinese and English, so it’s relatively easy enough to find your way around – if you can figure out the English version of the street name. The spelling isn’t consistent on anything – so you have to guess a lot! But – we make it through the melee outside the train station, and head down the road toward Lungshan. Along the way we find an ATM that actually works and get 2000 TD (at 36 TD to the dollar, it’s probably too much – but better safe than sorry).

We walk for about an hour (now we know why the girl said it’s too long), but it’s so worth it. We went through the business district, and made a detour through 2-28 Peace Park, so named for the Taiwanese who were killed in the uprising against Chinese Nationalist rule in 1947. The park is a very pretty piece of greenery in an otherwise crowded and hectic city. But it does have some bizarre sculpture and “memorial” art in there. The main memorial is a bizarre cubist type structure with a spire behind concrete cubes. Very odd as there are also traditional temples, pagodas and fish ponds in the park as well. It’s a pretty place to walk through and not too far off our path as we head through the city.

Next up, past the Presidential Palace which is a beautiful – and huge – red brick building, we enter into the Wanhau district, a very traditional Taiwanese area. This place is wild! It’s early on a Sunday, so a lot of the stores and restaurants aren’t open, but the ones that are open are teeming with people. The sidewalks are all covered in a portico type structure and jammed with either a) motor scooters parked all in a row, or b) restaurants with tables jamming the sidewalk, or c) fruit markets. It’s hyper Taiwan! People slurping down unidentifiable foods, bargaining over the produce, walking home with bags laden with fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers and food. A great view into real city living.

As we near the temple, we stumble into a parade on one of the main streets. Probably 1000 people marching, complete with the dragon, marching band, odd sounding instruments and other strange looking characters in costume. We stand and watch for a while until we think it’s clear to run across the road. Then head on to the temple.

The Lungshan Temple was built in 1738 by immigrants from 3 counties in China who moved to Taiwan. It began life as a Buddhist temple, but over time has had Taoist deities added into it’s design. Today, it is teeming with people –and I mean teeming. We can’t decide if it’s a special holiday or just a normal Sunday happening – but there are probably 500 or 600 people in there with incense praying to the deities, and making offerings of fruit, flowers and food. But the weirdest thing is that people are coming in and putting the offerings on these tables all over the temple,  but then they are taking the food too. We can’t quite figure that our. Everyone has these little plates that look like Frisbees, and they’ll lay down their “offering” of say apples. They bow, they wave their incense, then they take their apples back, put them in their bag, and take other apples on the table along with the Frisbee/plate. It’s too bizarre. And there isn’t a sole there that speaks English enough to explain it to us! Trust me, we tried to ask!

So, we just wandered around, looking at all the different deities and trying to be as respectful as possible to the worshipers. The architecture and the detail of the woodcarvings and sculptures is just astonishing. It takes your breath away. We know the pictures just won’t do it justice, you’ve really got to see it in the flesh.

After soaking in all the worship we could manage, we headed off to find Snake Alley! This is the place with all the restaurants serving up snake. Yuck! Well unfortunately (or fortunately) only one of the restaurants is open – with the requisite snakes in cages out front. But no one is eating there so we could only walk by and look at the snakes waiting to be chosen for dinner. But there were tons of other seafood restaurants – cooking up lobster and huge prawns right in front of us. And nestled in between all these restaurants are tons of massage stores – basically storefronts with tons of chairs – selling massages beginning at 800 TD (about $22US). Quite the contrast!

We headed back toward Peace Park on our way to the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial, when we stumbled on another temple on a side street. We think it was the Cingshan Temple, jammed between two traditional city buildings. We were peering into the temple from the front gate, not wanting to disturb any worshipers, when a man told us we should really come in, that it was a beautiful temple. That was all we needed, and we’re so glad he invited us – it was extraordinary! Gold everywhere, huge figurines of the deities (that we now really have to research to figure out what it’s all about).

 Back tracking through the city, we eventually wound up at Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial hall. This place is big! A huge plaza with massive entrance gates, beautiful gardens and a huge memorial hall with a bronze statue of Chiang Kai-Shek. The statue in his likeness is massive – as is the hall surrounding it. We looked around, took the obligatory pictures, but then decided not to tour the museum. We were getting a little tired and hungry – so we decided we’d strike off back toward the train station to see where we could spend our Taiwan dollars.

Back through Peace Park and out into the financial/shopping district, we looked for a bar or café to rest and have a beer. Those types of palaces don’t really exist here. Lots of coffee places, but they don’t sell alcohol, so we ended up at a restaurant – a Thai restaurant of all things! Like we won’t be eating enough Thai food in the coming weeks. But it was convenient – had a/c (a blessing!) and cold beer. That was all we needed.

Oh, and they spoke pretty decent English. Always a plus! We ended up ordering food as well as beer – kind of like a sushi menu – you choose what you want from the menu, then mark it on an order form. The waiter (owner) helped us, but we were pretty good at matching the Chinese symbols and placement with what we wanted. Ended up with some sort of chicken, some pork in lemon sauce and the beers. All pretty reasonable.

We left the restaurant and made it back to the train station much easier than when we arrived! We made the 3:15 train – but barely. We were down on the platform in plenty of time waiting for the train, but our mistake was to not pay attention to the boarding platform areas. We were way at the back of the platform, and the train roared past us and stopped a good 200 yards up the tracks. Another Amazing Race moment! We ran like hell to make the last car of the train. Phew! More exercise than we needed at that point in the day! But we made it and thanked our lucky stars for the 45 minute ride back to Keelung port.

Back aboard, safe and sound, cooling off in the A/C. Watched the sail away from our balcony (which is totally the primo balcony on the ship – this cabin is the best!), then did our norm! After dinner – managed to listen to a few songs at the island party, watched a totally wasted young lady be taken back to her cabin by a couple of her friends, then retired ourselves (not half so in bag!). Looking forward to a relaxing day at sea tomorrow!