Taiwan Travel Blog

Flight to Taiwan.
www.ladythetramp.com
I am tired. I left Philadelphia at 2 pm Sunday and did not arrive in Taipei until 5 AM on Tuesday. This is due partly to weird time zone discrepancies and to the fact that the flight is just plain long. I hate sitting on planes for a long time. It makes me feel dirty and smelly. You can’t ever sleep well on planes either.

9 AM today felt like 4 PM because I had been awake for so long. Now it is going on 6 PM and it feels like 6 AM. My body is all messed up and my mind doesn’t know what to think about it.

So far I really like Taiwan. Before coming I started getting anxious about all the scary stuff in China that got to me, people staring, people always laughing at you, and the utter strangeness of the foreign land. I am not feeling that in Taiwan. I feel very comfortable actually, very confident. Maybe just because I already know a little about the East this time.
Taiwan has a nice atmosphere to it. It is like China, but it also feels like an island. There are palm trees and something about the people and the building and everything, you can see that it is an island. It is warm and rainy here.

I walked around a little today and was joyful to see all the noodle restaurants, grubby and greasy, and the cheap junk shops, and the girls all dressed up in their little outfits. I went to a grocery store and bought some of my favorite Chinese snacks: dried tofu strips, wasabi peas, loose leaf green tea, drinkable yogurt and cups of instant noodles. I looked reminiscently on the cookie isle, remembering when Wade and I would devour huge packages of digestive cookies. I couldn’t find the ones we ate, so I didn’t get any though.

I can still understand a lot of Chinese, and I am proud of myself for that. I still have trouble speaking though, out of my bizarre, crippling shyness. I really like Taiwan so far. I can’t wait to go exploring some more.