Category: Taiwan

Taipei: Night market food photos

Here are some photos taken at various night markets in Taipei:

Taipei metro (MRT)

I can definitely see how Taipei would have been a nightmare to travel around in before the MRT was built. The first line opened in 1996, with most of the current system open by 2000 (though they keep expanding it – see their expansion plans). About 4 years ago the metro was flooded after a tsunami; the Taipei Main Station was under 2m of water and it took 3 months to restore the system to normal.

The MRT is very user- (and tourist-) friendly:

  • It’s fast, clean, safe and orderly
  • Virtually all signs have English below the Mandarin
  • Station names are listed in Mandarin and Pinyin (i.e. western letters) everywhere
  • Announcements are made in Mandarin (and Taiwanese and Hakka) and English
  • Fares are distance-based, ranging from NT$20/US$0.70 to NT$65/US$2.25
  • The EasyCard is a smart-chip credit-card sized (but thin) pass you buy at vending machines, for either NT$300/US$10 or NT$500/$17, of which NT$100/US$3.50 is a deposit on the card.
  • You can use machines to check the balance and add cash value to the card
  • At the end of your trip, you return the card to a kiosk or attendant and get back your NT$100 deposit plus any remaining unused value
  • Using an EasyCard gives a discount (20% I think) on the normal fares – so a short NT$20/US$0.70 ride is only NT$16/US$0.55!
  • To pay for a ride, you tap the card on a reader when entering the station, and again on exit; both times it shows you your balance, and on exit it shows the fare that was calculated. No need to figure out yourself how much to pay
  • The EasyCard is much easier than the token, where you figure out your fare, put your money in a machine, and get a token that you then use on entry/exit (and it keeps the token on exit)
  • They even have break-a-bill machines (e.g. for an NT$1000/US$35 bill from the ATM, you get 3 choices, of which the most convenient for me was 1xNT$500, 4xNT$100 and 2xNT$50 coins
  • The washrooms are very clean, and are often both inside and outside the paid zone
  • There is no eating or drinking in the paid zone (though water bottles seem ok)
  • The subway car door locations are painted on the platform, sometimes with form-a-line here indicators at busier stations
  • Transfers between subway lines have easy to follow signs (again, in Mandarin and English)
  • They are still expanding the system, eventually all the way to Taoyuan (airport TPE, which was almost an hour away by bus)
  • Exits are lettered/numbered for convenience (some larger multi-line stations can have 20 exits!)
  • Nice big area maps by the exits (only thing missing was a scale!)
  • You can also use your EasyCard at some retailers, like 7-11

Another useful feature of the metro is the nearly-free sightseeing provided by the above ground portions (a trick I’ve used in other cities like Bangkok):

  • The entire brown line (except around the local Songshan airport station)
  • The red line north of Yuanshan (inc. the Shilin night market and all the way to Danshui/Tamshui)
  • Spur line Beitou – Xinbeitou (“new Beitou”) i.e. for the hot springs
  • Spur line Qizang – Xiaobitan (near the southern end of the green line, a few stops before Xindian)

In particular, you see different neighbourhoods, and various jungly hills right on the edge of town.
I did in fact pass through every single station on the network (though I may have forgotten some minor above ground portion).

Taipei: Food – some meals I enjoyed

Here are some of the meals I enjoyed in Taipei.

Regarding the traditional breakfast, it was at Fu Hong Dou Jiang, a busy morning-only place on the 2nd floor across from Shandou Temple (blue metro line), a place I found online from other traveller’s posts
The couple in line behind me, who spoke English well, helped me order as there was no English and nothing to really point at.
The salted soy milk (shen dou jiang) was better than expected – the couple warned me against it, thinking it would be too unusual for westerners.
The bread (shao bing) is thick and made in a tandoori-like oven. I had folded into the middle of mine, though you can also have deep fried bread put in there.

Tip: Language difficulties pt 2

One thing I like to do is write down key phrases (and numbers) on a piece of paper that I can look at and study quickly without trying to flip through the phrasebook.

I also write down my own pronunciation guide for the word(s), especially here since the pinyin is a little confusing at first (see the related post).

It might go without saying, but if your handwriting looks like chicken scratch the way mine does, you really need to take effort to write cleanly. While I can figure out an English word that I scribbled, the pinyin and/or translation needs to be readable character by character or it’s not really useful anymore.

For example, excuse me is jieguang (with some accents not shown) and my pronunciation tip is jegwung. or is it jegiung? or does that say jegriung? hard to tell (for the record, it’s the first one, where wung rhymes with swung).

Travel technology

This was my first trip with a smart phone (Android). There were 4 (free) apps I used a lot:

  1. Adobe PDF reader for my downloaded Lonely Planet guidebook chapters. They were difficult to read on a small smart phone screen, but handy while out and about to double check something. Although the zoom function was weak – even with my good eyesight, the text wasn’t very big and the light blue markers/text for maps were darn near unreadable.
    Even reading the pdfs on my laptop was less comfortable than a physical book, but it beat carrying around a big guidebook (and if you’ve ever carried, say, the entire India guidebook, you know what I mean).
    Note: pdf reader was free; the Lonely Planet chapters were not.
  2. ASTRO file manager. Nice app for navigating my SD card, e.g. to find the pdfs (and put a shortcut on my home screen).
  3. WorldExplorer map program. In particular, I was able to cache portions of the Taipei map from google maps easily, to varying degrees of zoom, for use while walking around town. With a strong zoom, I could even see the building outlines just like on google maps website.
  4. Taipei Metro map program. Not indispensable, but it was nice to peek at the subway map from my seat, instead of having to get up and look at the map next to the train door. It shows both Chinese and pinyin names for each station.
    Note that the Taipei metro lines and stations do appear on google maps.
    Also note that they were in the process of renaming Danshui to Tamsui (which is notable because it’s the northern end station of the red line) to be a more accurate reflection of the name.

So what about wi-ifi you ask? Taipei is quite wired. Both my hostel’s and one cafe around the corner had wi-fi with 3-6 Mbps down and at least 500 Kbps up. So skype worked well for calls back home.

If you have a local Taiwan mobile phone, you can register to use the free wi-fi around the city (I noticed it in a few metro stations).

If I had been there longer, I probably would have bought a prepaid SIM card for my unlocked quad-band GSM phone. As it was, I didn’t have any real need to call anywhere.

 

Language difficulties

Mandarin is difficult. Another one of those tonal languages. As in “ma” can be pronounced 5 distinct ways for 5 different meanings (in Thai it’s 6 or 7 different ways for “ma”!)

Of course I didn’t look at my Lonely Planet phrasebook until breakfast the first day in Taipei, which didn’t help. In retrospect, with enough time, I wish I would have sought someone who speaks English and Mandarin (e.g. in Chinatown, or at a hostel if traveling) to ask for 15-30 minutes of pronunciation help. Oh well, maybe I’ll be better prepared for Hong Kong.

I’m not sure who created pinyin exactly – that’s the official way the Chinese adopted for writing in Roman alphabet (i.e. regular ol’ letters like in English). But it’s not English pronunciation (unlike Japanese romanization (romaji) which is pronounced as an English speaker would pronounce it).

For example, “sorry” is “duibuqi” (with some accents) but pronounced “dayboochee” more or less). Say what?

Or, to quote an example from the phrase book, foreign diplomats (waijaoguan with some extra accents) who pronounce it with a flat tone are saying that they are “rubber U-bend pipes” :-)

The LP guidebook/phrasebook suggests 2 things: Taiwanese people are friendly, and don’t worry so much about the tones. Case in point…

The second time I went to Taipei 101, afterwards I ate lunch in the food court in the bowels of the building. I had to circle the whole food court before finding a seat at a narrow table with barstools. A Taiwanese woman, Silvia, sat down across from me a little later. After a while, noticing my phrasebook, she asked me (in very good English) what words I knew. I swear she couldn’t understand half my words the first time I said them (mostly due to intonation, and some errors on my part). She helped me straighten it out a little. It turns out she manages the new office for a law firm that is headquartered in Seattle.

Using her spare cardkey, Silvia took me up to show the office and view, on the 45th floor (most of the Taipei 101 building is office space, with 10,000 people working there!). We had to switch elevators at the 35th floor “lounge”, which had a Starbucks and a Family Mart (main competitor to 7-11 here) with a view! She had only been in this office for a month, so it was with a touch of irony that I pointed out that her view was towards the Maokong mountain (where the gondola is).

So, Taiwanese are indeed friendly! And intonation does matter!

Scooters built into the plan

They take their scooters seriously as a form of transportation here. And yes, they all wear helmets.

To wit:

  • Dedicated scooter parking (with lines) on the sidewalk
  • Dedicated scooter pay parking lots, with its own gated entrance (separate from car entrance) and electronic reader board of #spaces left
  • Some dedicated scooter lanes and off-ramps from elevated roads (i.e. too narrow for cars)
  • Left turn areas without making a left turn across traffic
  • Scooter repair shops in regular shop spaces

Funny signs pt 2

Remember you can click on images to see a larger version.

Obligatory currency photos: Taiwan New Dollar

Here are my obligatory photos of local currency (at least the common ones, that passed through my hands).
There were lots of ATMs in Taipei which took foreign cards (Visa and/or Cirrus networks), including at the airport, so getting cash was not a problem.

Amtrak train, Vancouver to Seattle (final leg)

I’ve only taken an Amtrak train once before, and not across the border, so I was curious to take the train instead of the bus, even though it’s 1 hour longer (but more comfortable).

First I had to pick up my ticket, since you can’t print it online – you get a reservation code which you give to an agent (actually, they only needed my name this time) who then gives you your ticket and picks a seat for you at that time (i.e. no advance seat selection).

Then I had to go through immigration and customs at the Vancouver train station (much like large Canadian airports have US immigration and customs onsite) and baggage x-ray. There is checked luggage which you hand in after customs, and your luggage appears on a carousel at the destination terminal, much like at an airport.

The seats (2 on each side of the aisle) were pretty comfortable (more so than an economy airplane seat), leaned back, with a regular power port and free wi-fi (ok speed, and it worked on both sides of the border). Unlike the bus, you can get up and stretch your legs, and there is a dining car with hot and cold snacks and alcoholic beverages. I just bought a cup of Ivar’s clam chowder which hit the spot. (Steve picked up a snack for me while I was in line because I thought I heard someone say that there was no dining car. Oops)

The train stopped at the border for 10 minutes, literally right next to the big Peace Arch car border crossing, where 3 US agents went through the train checking passports and collecting the customs forms (though they didn’t look at bags).
Semi-surprisingly, about 8 people around me were visiting boyfriends or girlfriends across the border.

A few stops and hours later the train pulled into Seattle. Voila. End o’ journey!
(32 hours door to door including the train; for a while on the train I could barely keep my eyes open, but I wasn’t able to sleep)