HardKhoraTravels: Jigga I Nigga

Unless you know I'm mixing Chinese and English, you might have an eyebrow or two raised at the title. The title translates basically into This I Like. I still don't know much Chinese after being here several days now but I'm picking up bits and trying to piece that into something useful. I'm getting by mostly with pointing, waving my arms around, and using English.

View from the place we stayed at

This is to be the first of a few blogs on Taiwan and my time there. I'll try to blog only about a few specific things each post. I've learned while trying to blog a few times now after several days of not posting anything, I just have so much to say and I need to keep it more focused. At the end of my trip in Taiwan I plan to have a final post with my thoughts and that will serve as a somewhat tutorial to how to get by in Taiwan, with other useful information. I don't plan on making the tutorial too in depth, but will point out things I had a hard time getting info on and point people in the correct direction for further reading. Now let me get back to where I left off after I got onto the airplane to Taiwan.

I had a little confusion once I got off of my flight. One thing I was glad I did was, I grabbed the information card early in the flight to fill out for customs. I didn't see everyone grabbing one so I wasn't sure if I needed to, but I found out only people not citizens of Taiwan have to fill them out for customs. You'll have to wait inline again if you don't have a filled out information slip ready. If you don't have one ready, they'll give you a information slip to fill out and then you'll have to wait again. While making your way toward baggage claim, you'll see a fever screening. If you're feeling fine and coming from the US just keep walking. If you're looking for a bathroom after getting off your flight (into Taipei Airport) there should be one easily found around the baggage claim area. Another thing that seemed odd at first when boarding the airplane, even though I knew about the custom was the face masks. You'll have to realize that you're not in a quarantine zone, but rather people will be wearing face masks if they aren't feeling well or even if they think they might be getting sick to let others know and to keep from spreading sickness. Some will be wearing masks additionally to try to avoid catching things like on an airplane.

Getting to my destination wasn't too difficult because my girlfriend had already picked up some of the language and knew here way around a little, as she had spent a few weeks in Taiwan by the time I arrived. We booked our place to stay through www.airbnb.com, which got us both a nice place and a well priced place. There are other options/ways when looking for places to stay and I'll cover that in more detail in my final Taiwan post. The view was nice from the apartment and the place was festively covered with stickers of cars and traffic signs in a styling I'm used to in a child's room but I liked it. The bathroom was a bit of a shock because it had all of the controls in Chinese. The Chinese wasn't shocking but the fact that the controls were so complicated was. It was nice that it had a lot of program options and such but I couldn't make full use of them.

I wasn't very culture shocked and I think it was because I anticipated the environment I would be in to be a shock and it reminded me of being in anime movies, which I've seen plenty of. I know Japanese and Chinese look completely different but if you don't know much of either, they will leave you with the same bewildering feeling. I found little things became a source of major confusion. At the apartment getting the key in wasn't too bad. We stumbled through conversation with the two security guards and eventually got it sorted out when they called the person we'd rented a room from on www.airbnb.com. We were shown our way up to the room and in a no thrills manner of fact method. When it came to leaving the building (main door), it took a few attempts to figure out we had to hit what looked like a doorbell to open the door. On the first few attempts the guards open the door for us remotely.

The security that we had issues with!

Turning off the A/C in the apartment was an adventure in button mashing. Meg wanted to turn off the A/C but made the mistake of thinking the security system was the climate control. I thought it looked like the climate control as well. She hit a few buttons hoping for luck to get the results but the LCD screen never turned on, what did turn on was the alarm. We panicked and started hitting buttons after the siren went off for the alarm. I think I hit an orange button at one point during this process as well. The orange button I hit was an emergency button. This wouldn't be the only time I accidentally pressed a button like this. The other guard that didn't show us up to the room came this time. The guard didn't appear to be very amused with the confused foreigner looks we had on our faces. Eventually, we got everything figured out and learned how to appropriately leave the apartment. The day wasn't even over but the (mis)adventure had begun.