Five Fun Finds
Today marks six months. There have been times where I’ve really missed the States and have wanted to go back. And I’ve had to tell myself to hang in there, and to discover the great things about this city. Here are some things that are keeping me excited about living here:
1. Passion fruit. It’s delicious and easy to eat, you just slice the top off. Also makes for an easy drink (with some vodka). I can buy a whole bag of ten here for three bucks.
2. Elephant mountain. It’s like the Stanford Dish, but even better, in some ways. For one, I don’t have to drive there and deal with the madness of parking. I can walk there in five minutes from our place. Secondly, I think it’s a better workout, as it is all stairs. It’s like doing the Stair Master outdoors. Third, there is more nature to see – bamboo, green leaves, huge spiders, beetles, butterflies. It’s all quite magical when you get to the top.
3. Bread. We have fresh bread almost every morning, there are bakeries everywhere. Many times I will buy bread that is still hot – they have to leave the plastic bag open so it can breathe.
4. Restaurants. We can get to all kinds of restaurants within a short walk of 10 minutes. And lots of variety. If we don’t want to walk that far, we can walk to a Japanese, a New Orleans, and an American restaurant within 5 minutes. And the food here is really delicious. It’s pretty hard to have a bad meal. I also do love all the cafes. I don't think I've ever drank so much good coffee!
The rose latte at the Agnes B cafe is one of my favorites. Joe is having the ginger latte.
5. Efficiency in service. People here love to get stuff done. The US boasts apps like Instacart and DoorDash, but folks in Taipei have been delivering stuff by phone for years. I called a neighborhood grocery store asking for some chicken. I asked them when I could get them. The woman said, “I’m a bit busy now, but I will be there in 7 minutes, does that work?” She showed up at my doorstep, I handed her a bill, and she already had the exact change in her hand. The meat was still ice cold. At first, I didn’t really get why people never leave voicemails, but now I get it – by the time they leave a message, and get a response, too much time would have passed. Instead, they try another number, or they just call back later when they have time to deal with it. This is also why people almost always pick up the phone when you call.
Another example is IKEA. They will deliver and assemble your furniture for cheap. We went there a few times when we first moved, and in all instances, they’d deliver your goods the NEXT day. And they would be super apologetic if they couldn’t deliver the same day, or if the next day was booked up at the time you want. One guy would carry all the heavy boxes into your place. Then another guy arrives and assembles it all. We had a bookshelf with eight drawers, two nightstands, a sofa bed, two coat racks, and a shoe bench, and one guy assembled it all within three hours, for about $40 USD. If you’ve ever assembled one of those bookshelfs, you know that it would take a pretty handy person about five hours…this guy was a machine. And he just wanted to get it DONE.
One time we went to IKEA, we had a shopping cart of small items that wouldn’t fit easily on a cab, so we asked if they could deliver it too. The thing that was impressive was that the IKEA woman looked at the cart for about 5 seconds, and immediately was able to mark all the items on the receipt that was in the cart. Her efficiency was impressive (she was accurate, too). Things here happen very quickly, people don’t have the patience to wait around, so people are fast. And then she was super apologetic and said that with the number of items, she’d need to charge me $3 USD, would that be okay?
Even at a place like 7-Eleven, things happen at lightning speed. In Taiwan, you can pay all your bills at 7-Eleven. Yes, it’s probably still faster to do automatic payments online, but given that there are so many 7s everywhere, and that you will likely walk past one at least once a day to get a drink or snack, it makes it easy to pay your bills there too. You can also pick up train tickets. Or, if you don’t want your package to sit at your home waiting for you to get off work, you can have it delivered to a 7, and then pick it up.