Taipei, Taiwan (Spring 2024)
It’s been a long time since I’ve been back to Taipei and I was curious to see what has changed - especially since the pandemic. This is one of my favorite cities because the food is great and the public transit is fantastic and cheap so it’s very easy to get around and explore while eating excellent affordable food everywhere you go. It is also a place that embraces influences from the outside like Japan and the Western cultures so you get a wide experience here.
The city is also pretty much 100% safe like Tokyo. You can walk anywhere in the city late at night knowing they will be no hijinks going on. People let their kids walk around at night since there is basically no crime.
There is more homelessness now which I think is true of everywhere in the world now. You see people with cardboard shelters around the main bus station now that didn’t exist years ago. Overall the city is still a great place to explore with a nice clash of new and traditional cultures.
The fun in traveling is in seeing different things in the world than what you see at home. Some things that happen in Taipei that you don’t really see in other places are below:
Dogs on Scooters
Taiwan is a scooter city. The main modes of transport are the Metro (which is fantastic and cheap) and scooters. A lot of people take their dogs on the scooters and they sit in the foot platform without fussing and they never fall off.
Some of these dogs are not small. There must be some scooter obedience gene that has been bred into the dogs here.
Receipt Lottery
Receipts with lottery numbers along with the lottery month code
In an effort to make sure that businesses report transactions (and therefore get taxed), each receipt that you receive is actually also a lottery ticket. By making it a lottery, it gives the buyer incentive to ask for a receipt instead of making it an under the table cash transaction. There are websites that instruct you on how to read the ticket.
Sometimes the merchants will ask you if you want the receipt since if you don’t want it, they would get to keep the lottery ticket. If you are only staying a few days, it would be useless to you so just give it to a local.
Betelnuts
Betelnut shops are still all around the city. I believe the government tries to discourage them as they have signs in public places that forbid the chewing and spitting of betelnuts. The nuts bleed red so they stain your teeth red as you chew them.
I’ve tried these once. It was bitter and was like chewing a hard root. I’ve never tried uppers but I’m guessing this feels like a mild version. You get this warm buzz feeling in the back of your head after the stimulants from the juices get into your system as you chew the nut and you feel like you had one coffee too many.
The shops are signified with the half neon star sign and sometimes they have scantily clad girls hawking them so you can guess that the target demographic is men.
7/11 and Family Mart
I think a lot of people know that the 7/11’s are much nicer in places like Tokyo with much better food and fresh ground coffee, but in Taiwan they play a huge role as life revolves around the convenience stores.
You can pay your bills here, reload your transit card, and you pay for parking here. Instead of meters, their ticketers just ticket every car and then you take the ticket and pay it at the 7/11 instead of a meter.
I also found out that if you go there later at night (like say after a night of drinking perhaps), some of the prepared food like the delicious sandwiches are cheaper since they are considered “expired” after a certain time.