Day 1 – 11/11/2017 (Saturday)
This certainly isn’t my first trip to Taipei, but it is the first for Bruno. So needless to say, he’s all excited about it, especially the part of our trip when we’ll be heading to Jiufen, as that’s where his favourite Hayao Miyazaki took inspiration from for the famous Spirited Away movie. We’ll come to that later.
Also, my phone camera RIP-ed around the second day of the trip, so most of the terribly blurred photos were mine. The clearer ones were Bruno’s, who kindly shared his photos with me so that I can complete this Taipei trip journal.
In any case, this trip I’ve planned to just go for the standard tourist attractions for first timer, so most of the places I’ve actually been there already. We flew with SQ this time, and as we have sworn off red eye flights, we picked a departure time around noon, and reaching Taipei at around 4.30pm.
But before the flight, as usual, I made Bruno reach the airport way earlier than the check-in time, so that we can hang out a bit at the private lounges. I mean, since I have complimentary visits, why not? =D
We had been to the SATS lounge last year when we were flying to Japan, so this time I thought maybe we should try dnata lounge. BAD CHOICE. It’s cramped and messy, with NO USB charge ports, and the food provided was really quite bad. I mean, their scrambled eggs was terrible. And who the hell can fucked up scrambled eggs dish? Their scrambled eggs don’t even look like eggs, for fuck’s sake. Geez. What a nightmare. Their stir-fry udon is probably one of the better dishes being offered. Compared to dnata, SATS lounge seemed like heaven with neat and clean couches, USB ports at every seat for you to recharge your devices, and at least the food was quite decent.
Anyway, the food and coffee was so terrible that we decided to leave after awhile, and head to the public transit area where we got decent enough coffee from Killiney, and FREE USB charging ports at the couches along the aircrafts viewing panels. Soon though, we found ourselves on the flight to Taipei.
Flight food is, well, nothing to scream about. I picked fried fish with rice since the other option is always a chicken. I love their choice of ice cream though. Sea salt caramel flavour!
When we reached Taipei, we noticed that there’s a money changer booth even before we reach the immigration lines. Since we had the intention to change NTD at Taipei airport, we just joined the queue (which was very short) to get the money changed, before we joined the immigration line. I think it’s due to this decision, that we got a very smooth transition from point to point after that. Apart from the long queue at immigration, we went to retrieve our baggage at an almost empty conveyor belt (which I still had to wait for awhile for my luggage to reach me), and then after we exit the restricted area, I searched for the telco booths and find that they were EMPTY. No queues! Yay! It’s the very first time where I bought a country’s local prepaid sim card WITH NO QUEUES! Anyway, gotta love Taiwan telcos. NTD500 for UNLIIMTED 4G data for 10 days, with some calling time thrown in too.
It was then time to find the public buses to Taipei Main Station. The airport had changed a little since my last trip, but one just needed to follow the signs. We headed to the KuoKwang bus counter, only to found it being unmanned, and we were told that all bus tickets are to be purchased via the vending machine now. It took me a while to figure out how to buy the tickets, as I’m not exactly sure of the terms that they are using. But I still managed it in the end. Yay for my Mandarin skills lol.
When we boarded the bus, it was only around 5.30pm, yet it was so dark outside, almost like 8pm back in Singapore! There was quite a huge jam along the way, and some drizzling, but we managed to reach Cityinn Plus Ximending at around 7.30pm, almost exactly the timing when I told the hotel staff to expect us. I’m so glad I’ve thrown in some time buffer, otherwise I would be panicking on the bus already.
After getting our rooms and shuffling our bag items a bit, we went on our way to 宁夏夜市 (Ningxia Night Market) (map) for some food!
It was an eye-opener for Bruno, especially when we walked past the smelly tofu stalls… I think he nearly fainted dead from the smell, haha! We settled on a grilled stuffed squid (it was stuffed with seasoned sushi rice) with lots of mentaiko mayo.
And the mayo was so much that my hair was smeared in mayo when I attempted to eat it while the wind was blowing! Aaaaahhhhh. Bruno and I ended up spending like 10 minutes trying to get the mayo off my hair ends lololololol. It was frustrating at that time for me, but now that I think about it, it was funny as hell. That’s what you get when you don’t pay attention to which direction the wind is coming from! XD Anyway back to the food. The squid tasted pretty damn good! But it’s also very filling, so we couldn’t really stomach anything much afterwards. So we ended up going back to 西门町 and walked all the way to Carrefour to grab some big bottles of mineral water, instant noodles, and some necessities, before heading back to the hotel to rest up for the night.
Day 2 – 12/11/2017 (Sunday)
I had some trouble sleeping the first night because there’s a constant noise in the room… some metallic clanking that went on for the entire night. It was irritating as hell, and I think I didn’t get much sleep at all. Bruno went to the reception the next day to complain about it and they sent up a technician immediately. The guy attempted an impromptu fix by putting some blocks into the aircon vent, and told us that it’s due to the vent grills being loose. Meh, we didn’t think too much about it, thanked him and started our Taipei trip proper.
Oh yeah, it’s my birthday too! Happy birthday to me! =D
Anyway, we started off the day by heading to 西门町 for breakfast. There was an eatery which I used to have breakfast everyday during my previous trip, and I really missed the braised meat rice there. It’s called 天天利美食坊 (map), and honestly it’s really good and cheap! We ordered a bowl of 卤肉饭 each with a sunny side up egg (that’s NTD50), and a small meatball soup (NTD30) to share. That’s only like NTD130, which is about S$5.80. In Singapore, you’ll probably just get one person’s breakfast at that price, with lousy food to boot.
After the breakfast, I immediately went opposite the breakfast place to buy my favourite juice in the whole of Taiwan – the 苦瓜汁 (white bittergourd juice) at 柠檬屋 (map)! I’ve been YEARNING for it since my last trip and I finally got to drink it again! Yay! Bruno was skeptical about how it’ll taste like, and after he took a sip of mine, he liked it so much that he wanted more. Haha! I got another straw for him from the uncle at the stall, because I felt a sorethroat coming up, so that Bruno won’t get infected by me.
We slowly made our way to some stationery shops which I have bookmarked in my Google Maps, because Bruno wanted to go. But as we walked, I realised that I haven’t got my daily caffeine fix yet, and if I skip it I’ll definitely get a headache. So we just tried to locate a coffee joint, which happened to be Louisa Coffee (map), and thankfully there’s a small empty table for two in the super small shop. We sat, and slowly enjoyed our coffee while surfing on our phones. I can feel my sorethroat getting worse at that point… but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the lovely latte that the Louisa barista made for me! The latte was so good! Bruno got himself a matcha latte, which he said was pretty good too.
After we were finally done with the latte, I noticed I needed…. loo. And well, guess what, public loo is hard to find. -_- The nearby convenient stores did not come with loos, and in desperation, I went into a convenient store to ask where the nearest toilet is. I was being directed into a temple so…. um okay. Good thing I’m not particular when it comes to religions so I’m still able to step into different religious grounds without feeling weird about it. Surprisingly the toilet within the temple grounds was pretty clean. I expected it to be worse, to be honest.
Finally cleared my bladder, so we went on to the shop that Bruno had insisted he wanted to go – 光南大批发 (map). It’s a stationery shop, with a lot, a lot of stationery. Really a lot. We easily spent about 1 hour there just browsing their various stationery. They have tons of pens, pencils, stickers, folders, paper products, even scotch tapes, gift wrappers, etc etc. Amazing place. After this shop, we went to another bookstore called 垫脚石 (map), where I bought two Capoo comics for myself as birthday present, and it’s basement is also a stationery corner, which Bruno spent more time there.
After emerging from the shops, Bruno got a little hungry and I wanted to bring him to Taipei Main Station to find some food. But after getting into Taipei Main Station underground mall, I really could not find my way to the main station where I recalled there were many many food restaurants. We just kept going round in circles in the underground mall until I was so goddamn pissed. I wasn’t really hungry anyway due to the pain that the sorethroat was causing at that time, so I just told Bruno to eat what he wanted. But the beef noodle shop that he chose did not have anything that I can eat, so he decided not to eat there, which pissed me off even further. I was like geez, stop wasting time. I’m not hungry so you just eat!!! We ended up walking around the underground mall longer, and finally saw some small eatery. He went for the beef noodles shop, and since I can’t eat noodles, I just ordered a bowl of wanton soup for myself.
Halfway through the meal, I told Bruno I will head back to the hotel to rest up instead, because I felt really sick. It could be due to the lack of sleep AND the sorethroat – I wasn’t too sure. After the meal, I felt marginally better and actually offered to continue the day as planned, but Bruno insisted that we should head back to hotel for me to rest. While on our way back to Taipei Main Station MRT, we passed by a small shop selling random stuff, and they have a huge display of home slippers. I had wanted to purchase a pair upon coming to Taipei anyway, so I promptly bought myself a pair of lightweight, very “bendable” pink non-slip bathroom slippers. Cost me about S$12+ but it was actually very comfortable and good.
We went back to the hotel where I attempted to sleep for a few hours, but even though I was all sick and stuff, I couldn’t really sleep, so I just rested a little (perhaps I did drift in and out of sleep a bit), before we head to 淡水. Alas, it just kept drizzling when we were there, so we just wore our parka with the hood up. I really didn’t want to struggle with umbrella… Anyway, we went straight to 淡水老街 to look through all the stalls, and Bruno bought two packets of 鱼酥 right from the very first shop of the street. Umm… nice customer. Anyway we bought ourselves a 黑猪香肠 (black boar sasuage) to share, and it was sooooooo darn good! I’m feeling quite regretful that I didn’t buy more on the rest of the trip. Sigh.
We then passed by 郭金山 (map), the peanut candy shop which I was instructed to buy quite a few packets back for my mom, and after Bruno tried some of its candies, he was interested in buying them too. But we decided to find a place to have dinner first, before buying these back to the hotel. So we walked to the end of the street, and saw a small restaurant/eatery 老张记 opposite the road and decided to have our dinner there. I ordered the 卤肉饭 again (yes I can eat many bowls 卤肉饭 in one day!) as well as a bowl of 香菇肉羹 (roughly translates to “thick soup with mushroom and meat”). Prices are insanely cheap, with the 卤肉饭 being just NTD30, and the soup being NTD50. The reviews on Google Map seemed to be pretty negative, but I thought the food was quite decent. The establishment itself was quite dirty, but then I did not expect a sparkling clean eatery anyway…
After the dinner, we headed back to the 老街 and passed by a nougat stall, where they sell flavoured nougats by weight, instead of prepacked nougats. That was really quite a nice idea, and I was able to mix and match two of each flavours for my nephew and niece. The owner was very nice too, letting us try the different flavours before we buy. After buying the nougats, we went straight to 郭金山 again, where we started to discuss among ourselves how many to buy and what flavours to buy. The stall assistant told us if we buy 10 packets, they’ll give us one free packet. And one packet is NTD100… so you get 11 packets for NTD1000. So we ended getting 6 packets for myself, and 5 packets for him. With that, we hauled our loot and took the train all the way back from 淡水 to 西门町.
When we went back to our hotel room, the receptionist called up and mentioned that they have received a package under my name, and I was totally perplexed because I did not buy anything online and request it to be sent to hotel. However, the receptionist insisted that there is one and asked if she can come up to the room to confirm it with me. I was absolutely confused at that point, so I said okay. It turned out that she just wanted to give me a birthday cake as a surprise! How nice of her. =D She requested to take a picture of me with the cake, and we gladly obliged. I totally did not mention during the booking process that it’s my birthday today, but I guess they took note of it in my account and on my passport too. That was really so awesome of them! I gingerly opened the cake box and it was a hello kitty cake! So cute! Too bad I couldn’t eat it, so we put it in the fridge and Bruno ate it on my behalf the next morning, haha.
It was then we noticed that the metal clanging of the grills was back again (argh!) and I totally couldn’t sleep again, despite eating Fedac that was supposed to knock me out. I wanted Bruno to tell the hotel staff again, but he hated talking to strangers/dealing with them on the phone, so he tried to delay it until I snapped at him. He then quickly went to escalate it to the staff, and they promised to change our room the next day. Sigh, another sleepless night for me. (Not to mention Bruno snored like a truck every night, which made it worse…. =/ )
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