I hope the early bird truly does get the worm, because in Taiwan our butts are up by 6am, daily. I feel like we’ve kind of adjusted to the jet lag, but neither of us are able to sleep past 6:00. This can pose a bit of a problem because nothing here seems to open before 10:00 or 11:00am, but you can always count on good ol’ McDonalds to be open for breakfast. On Friday morning (our first full day here) we dodged a million scooters to walk about 10 minutes down the road to our local McDonalds. As you can tell from the above photo we were truly happy with what we were served. 3 pancakes, sausage, hashbrown and coffee for NT85 (about $2.25 Canadian) and NT65 for an egg mcmuffin and coffee (approx $1.75). This has got to be cheaper than buying groceries.
Mel’s Taiwanese co-worker gave us instructions on how to take the bus to the subway station. When we got there we bought easypass (frequent rider) cards and took the subway into the core of Taipei. I have to say I was really impressed… it was only about 20 minutes total from the school into Taipei, and it cost less than a dollar for the whole trip. The buses and subways are in English which really help as I haven’t yet been able to completely absorb the entire mandarin language in 24 hours as I thought I might.
After we got off the subway we walked around the grounds of the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, but it was really too hot to hang out outside, so we headed for the Taipei 101.
The Taipei 101 is either the first or second tallest building in the world… I don’t have the internet right now so I can’t look it up… either way, it’s tall. It is 101 floors high, if the name of the building didn’t already give that away.
The first 5 floors are a shopping area, but the type of shopping was a little rich for my blood. It was all Prada, Louis Vuitton business, and who needs that when you can buy the rip offs for 1/100th of the price a few blocks away! In the basement of the 101 there was a grocery store called Jason’s (the first good thing to ever come of that name!) which sells anything you could really want. In Korea if we wanted to get North American food we would have to travel 90 minutes and buy it on the black market and it was really overpriced. At Jason’s there was a much wider selection (I can’t really think of a thing I can’t buy…) and the price was about the same as at home. In a country where food is about 1/3 of the price as at home I’m sure the locals think it’s expensive but it makes me happy. We must have spent an hour in the store yelling “OMG they have Tostitos!” “Holy crap, ceasar salad dressing!” 
After lunch, we went to the 101 observatory and enjoyed the view. It wasn’t as smoggy as I thought it would be, but there was definitely a haze. Blame that on the (with humidity factored in) 42 degree weather!
I learned something new: there’s something that exists called a “damper” and in towers like this it isolates vibrations from potentially damaging earthquakes or other weather systems. Luckily, the good people at Taipei 101 took the opportunity to interpret their damper as a cutsie anime character called Damper Baby, and they sell Damper Baby stuff everywhere. He’s awesome and is available in 4 fun colors. Please enjoy the above photo of yellow Damper Baby in front of the actual damper. 
After we popped our eardrums coming down the elevator, we went to a nearby department store called New York, New York. There’s even a blinged-out Statue of Liberty outside. We didn’t buy anything, but we did have fun poking around the Toys R Us and the Daiso, which is a Japanese dollar store full of ridiculous products, but I’ll write a full post about that awesomeness later!
We then walked back to the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall because from the top of the Taipei 101 we’d noticed a garden and pond area that we hadn’t noticed earlier in the day and we wanted to check it out. By that point we were disgustingly hot and we’d already used a full pack of oil blotting papers, so we decided to go inside the Hall to cool off before heading home. Everything was in Chinese, and though they offered us an English guided tour we declined because were way too hot and tired to pay attention. We’ll go back someday.
That is pretty much the story of our first full day in Taiwan because when we got back to the school Mel and I both crashed. I don’t think either of us were really over the jet lag and we’d really tried to do a lot for our first day. I think we had naps and then went out for supper but I can’t say for sure, because I was definitely zombie-Shawn by that point. Either way, I have to say so far so hao.
PS: hao= good
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