Taiwan

So our foray into South East Asia ended with a one day stopover in Taipei.



Taipei is very similar to Seoul, or rather, Taipei is what Seoul should be. It is much smaller, but it's very clean, the subways run every two minutes instead of every fifteen, and it had interesting architecture, not just the same building built thousands of times.

We arrived in the evening and went out to Taipei 101. The sun had set by the time we got there, and no matter how many times I tried, I just could not get a good picture of the damn building. I had to use a slow shutter speed, and there was nothing appropriate to place the camera on that wasn't behind a tree or in the middle of the road. I therefore have many shaky blurry pictures of the building.

The elevator ride up was pretty cool, since it took less than 30 seconds to go up 84 floors, and the view from the top was awesome. However, we were surrounded by Korean tourists, and all of them kept talking about how the 63 building and Namseong Tower were more impressive. I got some strange looks from people as they were talking about it and I just started laughing. Korean nationalism is wonderfully obtuse at times that it just has to make you laugh. Finally, one woman caught on that I understood what they were saying (in Korean naturally) and gave me a dirty look as she walked away.

After the Taipei 101, we made our way over to the nigt market, which was pretty cool, and had cool gizmos that made you say "ooh, I want that!" before realizing that you had absolutely no need for it whatsoever. It was also quite exciting, because every 10 minutes or so, all of the street vendors in the middle of the aisle would VERY RAPIDLY pack up their goods and run away or hide in another store to avoid the policemen walking around. After that, it was simply hotel, airport, back to the apartment. Upon our arrival, we found that Mina's mom had bought us a new large coffee table, filled our fridge with food, and bought an electric blanket. Very nice way to come back. It's nice to sleep in my own bed again as well. Too bad I have to start working again though.

That's it, that's the entirety of the trip. I was out of Korea for a month, so there was no way they can blame me for burning down Namdaemun, which might have happened had I been here. Koreans like blaming anything bad that happens on foreigners.