No matter what people say, four hours of sleep is not enough sleep for humans or five year olds. However, we persevered and started our day to try to reset our body clocks to Taiwan time (+13 hours from Austin).
The first order of business was breakfast, ok, well actually coffee. Unfortunately Montie misunderstood the concierge and thought that Starbucks didn’t open until 11:30. What kind of place is this? We walked the rainy streets of Taipei in our pjs in search of coffee and/or breakfast. Or wait, was it dinner? We were fairly groggy from lack of sleep and seemed to be walking in circles not finding coffee or food. We finally settled on the hotel lobby resturant. I am not sure what we ate, but the coffee was good. As it turns out, the concierge said 7:30 – not 11:30. We’ve decided to stay afterall.
After breakfast we headed out to Taipei 101 the worlds tallest building. With Typhoon Bilis going full force, the visibility was poor, but the visit to Taipei 101 was really fun.
They had headsets that gave information about the building. When I went up to the counter I asked for English headsets and all five people working at the counter laughed. Was it that obvious we were foreign?
After lunch at Taipei 101, we set out on a quest to buy raincoats as it had been raining steadily since we landed in Taipei. The bottom 10 floors or so of Taipei 101 are a shopping mall, but unfortunately, a very fancy shopping mall. Since I wasn’t interested in paying $400 for a Dior raincoat I decided we needed to find a WalMart. Perhaps we weren’t saying it correctly, but no one understood what we thought was a universal word for “a place to buy stuff cheap.” After much gesturing and pointing our taxi driver seemed like he understood and took off into Taipei traffic. The ride was fairly hair raising and even though it had been raining buckets all day we weren’t sure a raincoat was worth the taxi ride. Obviously our charade skills were good enough and our taxi driver dropped us off at a large mall. This one was at least a bit more in our price range, but not a raincoat was to be found. There was however, a bookstore where we each purchased a badly needed Chinese/English dictionary.
After a good nap, we set out for dinner. We decided to venture farther than the lobby and walked into a small resturant a few blocks from our hotel. The poor waitress didn’t know what to make of us (we were soaked and very obviously not Chinese) and we certainly didn’t know what to make of the menu written only in Chinese. Luckily a kind diner sitting nearby translated the menu for us and we had a good meal for less than $20.
Ever obsessed with horses, Montie asked our kind menu translator for the Chinese word for horse (by the way it is ma-AH). He then proceeded to practice saying the word ma-ah through most of dinner. At one point the resturant got very quiet and Montie very loudly practiced his newest word for all in the resturant to hear. The idea of someone sitting in a resturant and shouting out the word HORSE struck Courtney and I as very funny. We laughed until we cried.
Perhaps it is jet lag, but it still makes me giggle when I think of it.
Bedtime is early tonight. We’re still adjusting and obviously in need of some sleep!
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