Cynthia's Overseas Adventure: Day 1

The good news is that I'm still alive. The bad? Toilet paper is apparently optional in Taiwan, and even if you do use it, you are not allowed to flush it down the loo (you have to chuck it into the bin next to the toilet). Like eww.

Did you realise I was in the picture?

We got on the plane at 10:30pm last night and I was excited for about 0.2 seconds before I remembered what my destination was. My sister was fine though.  

9 hours later, we arrived at Taipei airport. I was half dead because I'd managed to get kind of airsick during the flight. I didn't throw up or anything but it was still pretty terrible.

It would have felt way more welcoming if it wasn't like, 3am in the morning and if the airport had had more than 5 people present...

My sister went to the convenience store (7/11) and she came back with a rice-ball type thing stuffed with turkey meat. 

If there's one thing Asian people know how to do right, it's design their convenience stores. Seriously, look at all this stuff. There are a lot of self-service stations, prepare-your-ramen-instantly stations and even fresh-roasted-sweet-potato machines. Awesome.

We eventually got out of the airport (our cab failed to come pick us up) and we headed to the hotel. Taiwan is a really beautiful place...if you're into the whole dingy, polluted, urban-metropolis scene. There's a lot of this: 

 And this:

And this.

 We stopped at Starbucks and got coffee before tackling the Taiwanese version of Cityrail (which is like, 20 times more advanced than Australia's).

These are their "tickets". They don't need to be fed into a machine. Instead, you just wave them over a scanner thingy and the gates open.

 We visited a temple:

We went to the underground markets (at which point I forgot that I had a camera even though that was one of the liveliest locations we visited) and I came across this:

All six of us (my family + my aunty + my grandma) had lunch at a dodgy, little restaurant where we ordered 4 bowls of noodles, 1 bowl of beef rice and 3 bowls of fish balls. The total? About $12 (Australian currency).

Then we headed back to the hotel and kind of collapsed from exhaustion.

And yes, I have proof that you are not supposed to flush your toilet paper down the toilet:

I guess when I write it all down, it sounds like a really fun, big adventure but the reality of Taiwan is kind of.... underwhelming. Large parts of it are really dirty and cramped and I guess the unfamiliarity of it also scares me a bit. I've noticed a few strange things unique to Taiwan. About 1 in 5 people wear those surgical-looking face masks when they're out walking in the street, half the population wear glasses and a whopping 1 in 3 Taiwanese people wear those fugly-looking, ginormous bomber jackets outside. (I'm not being mean guys. Them jackets are ugly). Oh well it could be worse. I could've been forced to pee in a hole in a ground but luckily enough, the toilet that I went to had both a real toilet AND  a hole in the ground.Yay!