Asia Blog Entry #1

My first ever travel blog entry. It was orginally emailed:

My mom wanted me to write a travel blog so i figured I would start it out with an email. I will try to send periodic emails of my trip and if you want to skip them, just let me know and I will take you off.

Day one (or two? So confused on time.) Left LA to Taipei on Thursday night and landed on Saturday. Flight was uneventful but never ending. When I was looking at the Flight Info map at one point, it showed that we were over Japan. "Japan, we must be close," I naively thought. But unlike the people, there is not short distances between the countries and we had another 4 hrs to go. Between the 10 bottles of water I drank on the plane, I was able to sleep and watch three movies. Rock n' Rolla is quite good if anyone wants to see a good flick. Guy Ritchie has finally gone back to gangster flicks which is a welcome site for all of us esp Derek and I who were big fans of his first two movies.

The funny thing is that no matter how far we go, it seems like we always run into someone from the US or most importantly Florida. Did not take me that long as I was seated next to a guy from Miami on my flight. He was a freight forwarder and tried to sell me his services multiple times on the flight. As I have learned from my Dad and my brother, I passed the buck and told him that I do not handle it and he gave me information. I look forward to transferring his call in the future.

After landing and clearing customs in record time, we headed to the hotel. After cleaning up we decided to explore Taipei. It made the smog in LA look like Fiji since you could not see much. Of course the overcast sky did not help, but it is not the prettiest city. The one thing they do like building is temples to past leaders. I guess it is good to be a dead leader of Taiwan, because we went to two temples and they were two of the more impressive things that I have seen. Chang Kai Sheck (sp?) was the most impressive since he basically founded modern Taiwan for better or worse. (long story I'm told.) The best part of Taipei was the flower market which showed me a little bit about what the local life is like.

After going to the temples we had the unenviable task of finding lunch. Although almost everything is in English in airports, hotels, and subways, they do not like English people to eat lunch and I did not want to pick and pray on a menu in Taiwanese. After about an hour of looking we stumbled on the Red Onion Steakhouse. It was surprisingly not bad, but quite interesting. To begin, they had the world's shortest mix tape playing so we got to hear Endless Love three times. Not that I was complaining. They love to bathe everything in a gravy type sauce, so it did not matter if it was overcooked. But the best was the before dinner complimentary drink of apple cider vinegar. I think it was sometime of apple drink that fermented over time and smelled just like apple cider vinegar. Although good for black beans (that's for you Geoff), it was not good to drink. The first sip tasted like vinegar and the next sweet. Very odd place, but better than the Pizza Hut we were going to wait an hour for. I think Shrimp and Mayo pizza would have been delicious.

After lunch, we went back to the hotel and passed out for 13 hours and skipped dinner. We will be back in Taipei next week to see the other stuff we missed. After the long sleep, I finally feel like it is the right time and look forward to the rest of the trip. I am in the China Air lounge at the Taipei airport right now and about to board the plane to Shanghai. Finally headed to China and can not wait.

Till the next time,Matthew