How we spent our days in Taipei.

Right before we left San Francisco for Taipei someone asked me “How do you spend your days when you’re traveling? What do you do with your time?” It’s a good question, and not an easy one to answer since our days are so different depending on where we are. When we’re bike touring the answer is easy- we spend the days cycling and eating. If we’re house and pet sitting the day is structured around what the animals need from us and what we can explore in our free time. When we’ve pitched up in a new place though, or even a place we’ve been before, it’s harder to answer that question. So I decided to keep track of what we did on our second and third days in Taipei.

Day Two (after our first nights sleep, day one was 6:30 am arrival day). We slept until 6:30 or so, had coffee and tea in our room and went down for breakfast at 7am. After breakfast we hung about our room doing a little travel planning and catching up on emails and texts until 10.

Definitely worth a visit if you’re in Taipei for a few days, we spent about 90 minutes there and headed off for a restorative caffeinated beverage at a coffee shop we spotted on our way to the museum.

We read the home news (yikes!) and chatted and messed around on our phones for about an hour. Then headed out to find an adapter at a big electronics mall.

I checked my google map and found that a shushi place I had marked on my map at some point was nearby. It’s now almost 2pm and definitely time for lunch.

Back to the hotel by metro and we showered and chilled until evening when we headed out with two things to accomplish: find Rich’s favorite shirt at the Wufenpu Shopping District, and eat pork buns at Renhoe Night Market. If successful it will be the third time he has bought this shirt in Taipei. The market is a ten by ten grid of small streets all filled with shops selling clothing, shoes, and handbags. Rich is looking for one specific shop that for two years in a row had a shirt that he loves for Asia travel. The first one, purchased in 2023, was destroyed by sweat and sunblock and retired in Sri Lanka. The second was purchased in 2024 and is in France. It failed to make the trip back to the US for this onward hot trip to Indonesia. Rich had a good idea of where the shop is (and yes, this time we dropped a pin on Google maps), but it takes some searching, and the shops do change a lot.

Day three was another fairly early wake up, about 6:45 am. Pretty good after dealing with a frustrating and hilarious early morning hotel experience. Our room had a tv in the bathroom , so you could watch TV from the tub, and it inexplicably went on with full volume at about 1:30am. It took us a while to figure out how to turn it off, but we did and went back to sleep. But 45 minutes later went off again! We called the front desk and a staff member came up to our room with a remote control and did something. The tv thankfully stayed off the rest of our time at the hotel. But, it wasn’t the most restful night. 

We got back to our hotel after walking about 7 miles. After afternoon coffee and tea in our room we hit the hotel gym. The rest of the day encapsulated why we know it’s time to start looking for a place to be able to return to. A place with our stuff. With a kitchen where we can cook good healthy food. And where we can get enough exercise and do the kind of work outs we want to do. After the gym we showered and hung out, and then started the search for dinner. In my previous working life if you had told me “you will eat out every night. You won’t have to grocery shop or cook.” I would have been thrilled! But it does get to be a chore. And it is a struggle to eat healthy when you’re eating out so much. That evening after a bit of a struggle, we ended up at a lovely little family run Hong Kong style restaurant close to our hotel. No photos since we were both a bit burned out and wanted to just eat and go back to the hotel. It was good to have a check in with each other and confirm we are on the same page about finding a home base.