chinese new year trip part 1

To cover almost an entire week of trip in just one post is going to be too difficult I think, so you get it in stages. I will start at the beginning.

We couldn't make it on the fast train. Even with everyone telling us not to go on it and that many people in Taiwan wouldn't, it seems the lure of an 80 minute trip of the entire length of the island was too tempting to pass up since all the trains seemed to be booked. That was okay though since we have discovered the greatness of the aloha bus. The trip started out great, we got to Taipei after a bit of a crazy taxi ride and when we got to the bus terminal, we only had to wait 10 minutes for a bus to leave. Pretty decent for Chinese New Years Eve.

So we were off to Taichung, where I swore I would never go again for fear of ending up in a gutter again. Yeah, I don't have much luck with Taichung. Things always seem to go wrong there. This time didn't seem too much better either since after we got our hotel room, we decided to walk downtown to see what was going on. So two hours of walking later, we finally made it to the area we were headed in (little Europe, no less) to discover nothing open. And I mean nothing, other than 7-11's and family marts. So we had a drink outside 7-11 to decide our fate. I almost thought were going to have to plant ourselves outside of that 7-11 for the evening, and it wasn't even 7pm yet.

Finally, we decided to give up, catch a cab and go back to the hotel to drown our sorrows in 7-11 food and beer. Just as we had made this decision, we found a restaurant. Amazingly enough, we found a restaurant and with this discovery, we sat. For a really, really long time, we sat.

So that was day one. I was going to do day two today too, however, I'm too tired and lazy to post all my pictures, so you'll just have to wait for the Sun Moon Lake story. I will say, however, that it was by far the highlight of the trip, so that's at least something to look forward to.