Taiwan
- Alisha Teo
- Jan 20, 2017
- 2 min read
When I think of Taiwan, I think of street food, old-fashioned towns, and Taiwanese rom-coms.
My mother, sister and I made an impulsive decision to travel to Taiwan together a mere 14h after returning from our Northern Italy tour. In hindsight, it wasn't the wisest decision to go galavanting off to the other end of the globe quite so quickly, but I don't regret it.
The small streets of Taiwan were lovely to walk along. The architecture and facade of the high rise buildings made me feel like I had travelled back in time, and it gave the environment an atmosphere of nostalgia and "old-ness". Everything felt ordinary yet not mundane.
Because there were just three of us, and we were all travel weary, we spent our five days in Taiwan in a leisurely manner; waking at 10 or 11am, taking a break from walking about for afternoon tea, and returning in the evening to enjoy a hot bath.
On one of the days, we took a bus ride out to the coastal town of Jiu Fen, mainly to see the famous tea house that inspired a similar tea house from the animated movie Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki (founder of Ghibli Animation Studios). Jiu Fen had a similar vibe, full of sentimentality.
There was an afternoon where we did venture to exhaust ourselves with bike riding down the Mao Kong Mountain. But since the bicycles were electric, and it was a downhill ride we still had it easy.
On the one night we gathered enough energy and determination to leave the hotel, we went to Shilin Night Market. Arguably the most famous night market in Taipei.
Our brief and lazy five day visit to Taiwan (more like just Taipei really..) was, once again, too short and spent in too lackadaisical a manner. So we will return again soon, I hope. I found Taiwan very photogenic- not in the same pretty-photogenic as Cinque Terre or Venice, but in it's own busy, time-worn way it rendered exposures with the charm of a time well past.
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