Hello friends and family, welcome to our little travel blog, we hope to be able to post stories and photos along our trip here.
Anyways, this is Dan writing the first post (but dont worry Anna will also be writing in her own voice as well).
After quite a bit of trip planning and Anna finally sitting her bar exam, our trip began with a
Our trip officially started with a 1:30am flight from NYC to Taipei, a 15 hour flight, me and Anna’s official longest flight together (yay?). Both of us normally find it rather difficult to sleep on planes, but we were fortunate enough to get an entire row to ourselves allowing us to stretch out our gangly arms and legs. In fact there was enough room to allow us to take turns sleeping flat whilst the other took on sitting duties, acting as a pillow.
Upon arriving in Taoyuan airport we took the MRT (the local subway transit) to the HRT (high speed rail transit) where we zipped to Hsinchu meet Claudia and David, both friends from college who graciously offered a place to stay. The 50km journey on high speed rail took us approximately 9 minutes. Amazing.
Claudia graciously picked us up and took us to where we’d be staying, her parents apartment (who were currently on a trip) just upstairs from her own. After dropping off our stuff we immediately focused on the task at hand, getting food! A quick googling of breakfast options led us to Shandong Breakfast.
The reviews were all chinese translations so we were a little worried that ordering would be a challenge, but it turns out the son of the owner spoke pretty good english, but more so was super kind and gracious and suggested to us everything to order, we ended up with a pretty reasonable amount of delicious food, but more miraculously one of the dishes involved an omelette, and not only was Anna able to tolerate it, she in fact enjoyed it? Is this the start of a new era for Anna? Probably not, but stay tuned to find out.
After breakfast we walked back to our place where we subsequently overnapped for a bit before Claudia came back. Finally waking up around noon we headed for lunch at the Chenghuang Temple, as Claudia says, a temple for ghosts that has also turned into a makeshift street food area. We had some delicious meatballs, soup, and local noodles, then topped off with some amazing Taiwanese shaved ice.
After eating we spent most of the rest of the day pottering about before having some quick beef noodle soup at Claudia’s and then passing out heavily jet lagged. Day 1 complete!