Traveling Around the World - Taiwan

I have a small dream, I wish to be able to travel around the world, going to different places around the world, meeting new faces everywhere I go, understanding the difference and the similarities of the people around. I love traveling a lot..!! And when I said traveling, I meant traveling without a tour guide telling what to do, where to go, what time to meet up.. No..!! Traveling with a map, interacting with the local, walk in a random store and have a good meal, trying to skip the tourist spot, do note that I did said try, come on, you can't say you had been to Taipei when you have not been to Taipei 101 right?

Now, taking the first step during the mid of 2008. My first trip without my parents, only with my sister, my brothers and my boy friend. Taiwan~~ Well, technically speaking, for this trip, we do have a tour guide, we do have a tour bus, so it's not how I would call traveling. But then there was one day during this trip, one long day, where we were on our own. We had no plans at all, all we have was a map and a memory of a few nice places to go to. And this was the spark that made me fell in love with traveling.

So we started with studying our maps. After stepping out of the hotel, when we had to decide whether to take left or right, we continue to study our maps, hard. After struggling and brainstorming over it, we just picked one, and off we went. We took the subway, here, another map to study, the railway.. The whole morning was all about maps, big ones, small ones.. We walked and walked, and asked around (I'm glad this was Taiwan, chinese is SO not a problem), end up being tired, so we decided to take a break at a stall, had a drink and moved on. Of course, after all the hardship we went through, we arrived at our destination, Xi Men Ding(西门丁). We will be visiting this place within the next few days, but then hey..~ we got here by ourselves and that made it a whole lot different, we were proud of ourselves. We were extremely tired, of course we were, and hungry too. Looked for a place to have lunch, honestly this was so not planned and random, we just went in the next restaurant we laid eyes on. It was a mess but it's so much fun.


After lunch, we were excited with the coming adventure. We wanted to find this place called Wu Fen Pu (五份铺), it's a place which sells all sorts of clothings at dead cheap price, a whole variety of them. How did we knew of this place? We heard about it, people talk about it, saw it on tv.. Typical..~ The place was packed with people, and indeed the cloths there are all in fashion and are all seriously freaking cheap, talk about the variety, I think you won't be able to find a replica of the same dress there. And when I say clothing, I do meant cloths, shoes, bags, accesories etc.



There was this place, an opening, with a long long long queue of people. The joke here is this, we did not know what were they queue-ing for, nor do we know what is the product being sold, we just followed the crowd and just queued, I mean what the hack. It was a actually small stall selling fried chicken, the ones that are available in pasar malam nowadays. It's either that we were too hungry or it is really really good. Then, after getting enough rest for the legs and food in the tummy, we took the bus to my god brother relative's place, somewhere outside of town. We were all exhausted, thrilled, but just exhausted.


I did went back to Taiwan again in the end of 2009, but this time I join the Youth Travel in Taiwan. This is where a big bunch of youths aged 18-27 go on a trip, visiting around Taiwan. This is an experience which I would not had trade with anything else. It was a long long long 21 days there, everyday was fully, I tell you totally fully utilized. It was horribly exhausting but in return it was a whole lot of extreme fun.


Soon, Taiwan.. I will be back again.. As a traveler that I dreamed of.