Friday in Taipei

Today was out first day without an appointment to make.

Romi woke up and had breakfast, we had breakfast, and then he took a nap. When he got up we headed to Longshon temple, the oldest in Taipei. It was much smaller than the one by our house, but it came complete with a beautiful waterfall.

Like the other, it was busy with people buying offerings, incense and worshipers. It was beautiful. The intricacy of the artwork here blows your mind. We even saw two men cleaning some of the Temple's bowls. One man was using a hair dyer on a carved bowl that is who knows how old. The flower offerings were spectacular, with everything from birds of paradise to orchids to star gazers.

Nearly everyone we passed gave Romi loads of attention, including one older woman who circled her face and gave him a thumbs up. We agreed that he's a good looking boy. An elderly monk took a special interest in Romi and I have some great photos of her holding him.

Feeling emboldened we set out to the Metro. It's a great system, and similar enough to other mass transits in the world that we could figure it out pretty easily (thanks also to Lee for some tips). It's surprisingly inexpensive to get around Taipei, both via cab and metro. The fare is charged by where you start and where you end up and you get a plastic coin which you put on a sensor to open the doors. Pretty spiffy. The dark blue seats are designated for the elderly, the disabled, pregnant women, and people holding babies, and without fail we had seats on the train.

We Americans are both lucky and spoiled. Here we were, literally half-way around the world, and not only are all the signs in both Chinese and English, but a nice recoding reminded us in our native tongue not only which stop we were at, but were to get off to transfer to get to Chiang-Kai Shek Memorial Hall. The metro even has designated areas with extra security cameras for women traveling alone at night.

We got off the metro and wandered past the National Concert Hall, an impressive building even when covered in scaffolding. We wandered through botanical gardens to the Memorial Hall, climbing the numerous steps to the top. Think the Lincoln Memorial, but in a MUCH bigger building. We didn't see any of the exhibits but did head toward the shopping district.

We tried to make it to Taipei 101, but it was getting late, Romi was getting both tired and hungry, and we had money issues to solve. For some reason, our credit card won't work here. We spent a small fortune calling Visa, who says there is no problem. We weren't too concerned until we couldn't get money from the ATM either. We needed money to buy food for Shabbat and pay both the hotel and Mr. Yeh. Don't worry, we think we got it worked out.

Some random Taiwanese bits: the ever-present scooters aren't allowed to make left turns at intersections, so they go into the crosswalk to cross the street with the pedestrians and then turn right. We've seen scooters with moms and two kids, an old man with his dog, and helmets with all sorts of personality, from Mickey Mouse to horns.

The Burger King ads have a cartoon bear. Seems as if their best-seller is a salmon sandwich.

I had the hotel launder three pairs of my pants and they came back pressed nicer then I would ever have thought humanly possible. I felt guilty wearing them. Seriously, they are so nicely done that my cotton pants are now too big; the wrinkles were taking up enough space to keep them up!