Winter Holiday: Part I

After spending the winter holidays in Japan every year the past 3 years, I figured I was justified in spending this winter holiday elsewhere. I went to Taiwan on Christmas Day, and stayed until January 3rd. I had an ulterior motive for going to Taiwan, but more about that later.

Why Taiwan…the wife of one of my friends on the tennis team is a writer. A few years ago, she was asked to join a group of Japanese writers for a project to research and write about the unique culture of southern Taiwan. She lived in and traveled around Taiwan for 2 months for the project, and in the process, fell in love with the island. Now, she and her husband go to Taiwan every year over the winter holiday. They have told me about their trips many times, and this year I kind of weaseled my way into going too.

December 25th:
I flew out of Narita in the evening on Christmas Day…but in order to get to the airport on time, I left my apartment at 11am. It was about a 4 hour flight to Taiwan, and then an hour from the Taipei airport to my hotel. Fair enough to say it was a full day of traveling! The flight was a little bumpy…in a way that felt more like the bus drivers who don’t really make much of an effort to avoid the potholes in the road…but the only truly interesting part of the flight was when they handed out the customs declarations and landing documents. I have to admit that in some way I’ve come to consider international travel the same way I would consider traveling from, say, Iowa to Kansas. I do what I need to ensure transportation to and from, and the rest of it I reckon I’ll figure out along the way. I think I was lucky that I realized at the beginning of December that I hadn’t looked up information on visas to Taiwan. For some reason I had been fairly confident for no good reason that I wouldn’t need a visa to enter Taiwan, but luckily I had a brief moment of clarity in regard to the fact that Taiwan is arguably technically part of the Republic of China….and visiting mainland R.O.C. DEFINITELY requires a quite expensive visa, with lots of fun visits to the Chinese Embassy before the trip. I did look up Taiwan visa requirements on the internet, and found that said U.S. citizens didn’t need one for less than 30 days….although one part of the site used the phrase, “good to go,” so it kind of stuck in the back of my mind that I should have used more than one source.

So, anyway, the flight attendants handed out the customs and landing forms, and as I was filling out the customs form, it asked what kind of visa I was on and what my visa number was. From that point on, I had a small, nagging doubt in the back of my mind about the visa situation. Standing in line at the customs counter after arriving at the Taipei airport, the visual of being put on the next flight back to Japan for not having the proper entry permission was becoming more and more active. Luckily, that didn’t happen. The other funny memory from the airport involved unloading the plane. We had to be bussed from our plane to the terminal…do you remember that scene in the movie “Speed” where the bus passengers were told to sit still, look straight ahead and look defeated so they could make a loop-back tape to run to fool the bad guy? Riding from the plane to the terminal felt very much like that moment. Everyone on the bus was relatively still, travel drowsy, not talking much, just starring straight ahead through the windows at the terminal building. I had to suppress a smile.

I was to spend a few days in Taipei on my own before heading to southern Taiwan to meet up with my tennis and writer friends (hereby referred to as “Tennis Guy” and “The Writer”). The Writer had basically written an outline of recommendations for what to do in Taipei, starting with how to get from the airport to the hotel she recommended- airport bus into the city, about a 1-hour trip. No worries! Except none of the signs in the reception lobby at the airport said ‘airport bus.’ I played eenie-meenie-meinie-moe and followed a sign for the ‘express bus.’ Luckily it was the right one. An hour later (after accidentally sneaking onto the bus before the one I was supposed to be on), I got off at the 3rd stop (as instructed by The Writer), and again played my odds with which way down the street I was supposed to go. Luckily there was a gigantic hospital across the street from my hotel, so I only danced around the bus-stop area (which was just a bunch of metal signs on a sidewalk) for a few seconds before I saw it. Just in case anyone ever finds themselves in need of a hotel in Taipei, I recommend “Shin Shih Hotel!” I settled myself in just around midnight (except it was really 11pm because as I realized the next morning, my bedside clock was an hour fast) to an HBO movie. This was a huge thrill because I hadn’t seen cable TV in I don’t even know how long now.

I do also have to comment that I was happy to see kanji characters that I recognized on the road signs driving from the airport into the city, and even happier when the meaning behind those kanji appeared to be the same in Chinese as in Japanese. That’s not always the case. I think someone told me once that the kanji used in Japan for something like stationary or postcards means toilet paper in Chinese. Cause for caution.

December 26th
The Writer had recommended that I tackle the National Palace Museum this day, and tackle it I did, after a slow start to the morning, which wasn’t as slow as I thought it was after I realized the thing about the clock in my room. The Writer had given me a little file before I left Japan with a bunch of business cards that followed the order of the outline on the “to do” list she made for me. Hence, I knew exactly what bus to take, had Chinese kanji written out for me just in case I needed to elicit the help of a bus or taxi driver, etc. Getting to the museum was a piece of cake. The National Palace Museum of Taipei is said to store the largest collection of Chinese artifacts in the world…because when one of China’s former rulers fled to Taiwan, he took most of China’s treasures with him. I didn’t feel like the museum actually had as much on display as they could have, but even so, it was enough to make me reconsider how I felt about my world history knowledge. The back of the museum entrance ticket outlined the time-table of China’s periods, eras and dynasties. I was constantly pulling it out of my pocket to refer to it while wandering through the exhibits, just to get my bearings historically. I can’t say that the Fort Dodge, Iowa school system had much of an emphasis on Chinese history, and seeing as how my Geography advisor in university was from Africa…..I’ve always considered myself a bit of a connoisseur of ancient history, but I had to re-examine that label, standing in front of 8,000-year-old artifacts of whose existence I was barely aware up to that point.

It was a Saturday, which meant that the museum was open later than usual, which meant I was able to spend 7 hours there. If I ever ask you to go to a museum with me, I recommend that you politely decline. If you ever invite me to a museum, I’ll make you wear a button that says “Glutton for Punishment.” Actually, in my defense, a fair portion of those 7 hours were spent dodging the tour groups that would swoop in, fill up an entire exhibit space, and before you knew what hit you, swoop back out again. You had to watch out not to get caught up in their stampede. If they snuck up on you when your undivided attention was on the exhibit in front of you, you would look up to find yourself trapped.

The Writer’s suggestion for post-museum activity was to hop a bus to a hot spring area. But, because I spent so much time in the museum and wasn’t sure how late buses ran throughout the greater Taipei area, I decided to head back to the hotel, find dinner and relax. There was a night street market a few blocks from my hotel, where it was recommended that I try to find something for dinner. I walked up there and checked it out, but at this point, I was hungry for a real meal, not just street vendor food. Unfortunately, it was coming up on 10pm, and a lot of the food shops were closing (one of the differences between Taiwan and Japan….in Japan, food shops would have already been closed for 1-2 hours by that point!). As it turned out, the food shop right next to my hotel was open late, had delicious food, AND had a menu written in both English and Japanese so I could really figure out what it was I was contemplating ordering. Yipee! I had an unexpectedly fantastic large bowl of spicy vegetable and noodle soup.