Taipei

Thursday 2^nd October Keelung (for Taipei) overnight

Our passports were collected from us when we reboarded in Yokohama and we are given an official photocopy to take ashore with us in Keelung. As we will be docked here overnight, it’s a good chance to go into Taipei as that will take more time than hanging around Keelung. We’ll do stuff in Keelung tomorrow.

First stop is to get some local currency, which is supposed to be easy with the photocopied passport we have been given. No. It might work in the terminal where 20 or more people were waiting in line, but neither of the 2 banks we went to accepted it. Luckily in the 2^nd bank the staff member took us out to the ATM and helped us negotiate the process.

We are at the train station in time for a train around 10am. It’s a fairly pleasant trip and takes around 45 minutes. Things fall apart at Taipei Main Station though, it’s really big and we don’t know where the hell we’re going! Doesn’t help that signage leads you into a mammoth shopping centre, then at some point, there’s no signs! We wander for about an hour looking for the HOHO bus. Glad we didn’t pre purchase the tickets. Not happy. Bail on that idea and head back the way we came and buy a ticket, which is actually a round blue token, for the station at Taipei 101. But what we should have done was head straight for the dumpling shop that I had read makes really good food, especially the Xiao Long Bao or soup dumplings to the uninitiated. Beautifully crafted, with 18 folds in a circle and the juices form the soup, inside the dumpling. By the time we get there, after Taipei 101, they’re about 10 minutes from closing and say we can only get takeaway. Anyway, whatever, they were very good, even if we did have to sit on the edge of a garden bed around the corner to eat them.

So, how many floors does Taipei 101 have I hear you ask. Could it be 101? Well, yes, surprisingly it does! The exit from the station delivers us to the foot of the building and it’s really hard to see how tall it is, because it’s straight up and there’s no stepping back to see. The signage isn’t too bad here and we find our way fairly quickly. Speaking of quickly, the elevator to the viewing floors clocks 1010 metres per minute at it’s fastest. My ears pop twice! The building is inspired by the design of a pagoda

To counter the forces of wind and earthquakes, the building has a Tuned mass wind damper in the top of it, and normally they’re not visible to the public but this one is, and it’s huge! It hangs on thick cables and is supported from below on shock absorbing legs. During a Typhoon in 2015 it reached it’s highest recorded lateral displacement – 100cm! In level 13 winds! So it does the job!

We headed back to the train via the dumpling shop and the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. One of Taipei’s cultural landmarks. A huge white building with a blue glazed tile roof housed in large traditional gardens, it houses 2 artistic venues, a large statue of CKS, a former leader of China and then Taiwan. There was an exhibition of Turner’s artworks that would have been great to see but unfortunately, we didn’t spend much time looking around and appreciating it all because the heat had gotten to me, so we had to leave. I’d really like to come back here, but it would need to be in a cooler season, if such a thing exists.

Back to the ship and take some time to cool down and regroup before heading out to the reknowned night markets, always a good place to get some street food and local interaction. I didn’t really expect to find the ‘one bite sausage stall’ but we did and they were good! Missed the fried chicken that had been the other recommendation, but Trevor had a skewer of chicken tails (???) and we shared some octopus balls. Also bumped into Matt, an enrichment speaker on this cruise, and his Dad who is tagging along on the cruise. Matt’s subject is astronomy and space and his next talk is how space and the movies met.