Lessons Learned from Brazil

Last year, Marieke and Jon showed up a day late to Brazil, due to weather getting out of Newfoundland and Montreal. This year, they decided to lower the chances of that by building in two overnight stopovers. While on paper this seemed like a crazy idea to take three days to reach Taipei from St. John’s, with accommodation in Montreal and a hotel in Japan, they bought themselves some buffer and sleep.

Or Not.

Meanwhile, I had very tight connections. While direct flights were available (the route Cheryl opted for) from Vancouver, they were overnight so you arrived at 6am and have to stay up the whole day. I was booking through points and it was the same price to fly from Victoria as Vancouver with a stop in San Francisco during the day, so opted for that route. About a month before my flight, my 8am departure was changed to 6:30am, less than ideal considering my love of mornings. 

Mentally prepared and feeling very organized, I woke up the day before my flight with a notice my 6am flight was cancelled and that they were trying to rebook me. With short connections, re-booking was apparently challenging as i didn’t hear anything for a couple of hours. Finally, I called and got offered to fly out that night. Somehow, despite my best intentions, I ended up running around the house trying to get out the door to get the bus to the terribly-served airport, where i walked the last 20 minutes in the pitch black in the bike lane as there was no sidewalk. It wasn’t snowing yet in Vancouver when i arrived at Cheryl’s late that night, but there was a ton of it when i left at 7am back to the airport for the flight to San Francisco that was miraculously on time.

A few hours later we were still on the runway, for another 2.5 hours, due to a line up to get de-iced. Inevitably, my flight to Taipei was long gone. Although I couldn’t find a lounge that was on my side of security, the San Francisco airport was actually pretty nice. I even got to choose between “ambient” and cold water to refill my water bottle. I’m assuming ambient meant warm- i obviously chose cold. The food vouchers also helped a bit. It was a good thing as I had 9 hours to wait for the midnight flight from San Francisco….yup, the overnight flight route Cheryl was on and which i had opted to avoid. Maybe three days of traveling is the way to go….

Finally Arriving in Taipei

My last flight finally took off an hour late but made up time in the air. I also managed to sleep with no one sitting next to me. When I arrived, Cheryl had landed two minutes before me so that worked out well. With Marieke and Jon’s instructions having landed the day before, we were greeting them at the hostel by 7:30 am. After a very necessary coffee, we headed out for the day, careful to not go back to the room and tempt sleep. 

Exploring Taipei

Rita’s friend Kat had recommended watching the changing of the guard at the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall, which was about a 20 minute walk and took place every hour, on the hour. It was the one thing we wanted to make sure we did as we weren’t sure if it would be happening when we returned to Taipei later in the trip during Lunar New Year. With lots of time, we meandered through a park and realized we missed it. So we meandered to the botanical gardens and we realized we missed it again. Finally, we headed straight there. We got waylaid at the awesome vending machines were we got cold brew (and one inadvertently hot brew) but third time is the charm and finally got to watch the ceremony.

Our one task of the day complete, we headed for a dumpling lunch. Still getting used to the currency and exchange rate, we weren’t sure of how many to order or how to order, but as we would find countless times in the country, everything was very orderly and people patiently explained to us how to do it. We ended up with six each at $0.30 each. They were delicious and next time we would order more, but it worked out well as we saved room for our first bubble tea of the trip. The third caffeinated beverage of the day also helped (although i was feeling surprisingly fine).

To keep ourselves awake to 8pm, we headed out to the famous Raohe night market were we had Michelin-starred black pepper buns for $2, deep-fried mushrooms and cheese and passionfruit custard tarts we opted for after realizing the delicious looking strawberries would have been $20! Better to stick to local for sure.

Finally we called it a day and allowed ourselves to go to bed at 8pm.