Off to More Adventures! - March 27, 2024

 After many many months of planning, we are off on our Asia/Africa adventure.  This will be the longest trip we have ever taken by far and will pretty much take us around the world.  Not like "Around the World in 80 days" itinerary, but a hefty itinerary for us none the less.  

Our first stop is Taipei, Taiwan - the same time zone as Shanghai, China.  We arrived on Thursday, Mar 28 - feeling tired and out of sync with our new location.  We grabbed a taxi from the Taipei airport to get to our first night's hotel close to the airport.  We were too tired to explore the area to find something to eat - so ate a few left over airplane snacks and went to bed.

This morning we woke up early so there was plenty of time for the free hotel breakfast buffet.  The buffet was such an odd mixture of cuisines.  There were a lot of Asian food choices, mixed with western style items like bacon, scrambled eggs and sausages.  There were several German dishes with bratwurst.  There was a complete salad bar plus a whole container labeled "Fried Foods".  I thought it was going to be battered deep fried fish and other seafood things.  But there was French fries, egg rolls and various Asian fried shapes with pasty vegetable fillings.  Some tasty and some not so good surprises!  

We managed to get an hour or so of walking in.  We went to the mall basically across the street - thinking we would check it out.  But it didn't open up until 11am.  We were on the 19th floor of our hotel and could see the Costco sign from our windows.  So we left the mall area and headed up in the direction we thought it was in.  This is a very industrial area so there were not many people on the streets.  There were walk/don't walk signs for the very large streets, but sometimes it was not clear at all when you could cross.  Luckily for us - most of the time there was at least one person wanting to cross and we would just follow their example.  

Though it is not as bad as Thailand or Vietnam - motorcycles are very much part of the culture.  A lot of times on smaller streets people walked in the street along side the motorcycles and cars and motorcycles were parked on the sidewalks!  We made it to Costco and wandered through the aisles.  It looked very much like our Albuquerque Costco.  Food samples were in abundance.  Long before the sales person had finished cooking their samples, people would que up.  One very popular sample was for grilled pork in a sauce.  It had a que of people about 15 long!  

We have always had a hard time finding salted mixed nuts in Asia - so when we first walked in we discussed getting a package, but decided to wait until we were ready to leave.  As we stood near the check out area, Mike and I were discussing how to get out of the store.  A kind gentleman heard us and told us to just walk through the check out line and leave.  Michael then remembered we wanted the nuts and went to get them.  We got in line - the same kind gentleman came back to me and repeated his directions for getting out.  He had not noticed that we now needed to pay for the nuts before leaving and thought we had misunderstood him!

We then walked back to the hotel to nap and have lunch.  We had a lovely Japanese meal at the hotel restaurant before being picked up by our ride to go to our Airbnb.  Once there we had the usual decisions to make to figure out where things were how things worked and who was sleeping where.    This apartment is very sparce.  There are coffee cups, but no glasses.  Several sized of bowls, but no plates.  A couple of saucepans but no frying pans.  Thankfully there is a microwave and a hot water pot.

I don't know why, but we seem to especially challenged in finding stores in other countries even when we have their address.  I don't know if Michael was using google or apple maps, but we spent our usual 20 or so minutes going somewhere that was only a five minute walk from our apartment!  The store itself was a maze of quirky little areas that sometimes led to other aisles or sometimes you had to return back the way you came.  Eventually we found most of what we needed.  Bread choices were extremely limited.  As we checked out our clerk pointed out that our family size loaf of  bread expired today - would we want to see if there was a later dated loaf?  I got lost trying to find the bakery area again, but eventually found it.  I explained the date problem (by pointing and gesturing) to the same kind lady who had helped with the original choice.  She pulled off 10-15 loaves of bread off the shelves before declaring that 3/31 was the "newest dated bread" on the shelf.  I will have to find some way to freeze it until the kids get here!

We went out searching for dinner around 6:45pm.  We did not want to go too far from the apt as we are both very tired.  I was in the mood for rice and vegetables.  There are a lot of restaurants around us, but most of them seemed to serve soup or something we could not figure out.  We ended up at what must have been a new Vietnamese restaurant as there were very few people in it.  It was pretty tasty and fast.  We ended up returning to our apartment in less than 45 minutes from our starting time.

A metro stop is very close to us.  Tomorrow we will figure that out as we need to go back to the airport to pickup A&J