Welcome to Taitung!

This morning we got up bright and early and headed to the train station. The train to Taitung was scheduled to depart at 8am and we were on the platform by 7:40. Neither of us had taken the train here before, and we had heard that the Taiwan rail system was quite nice. Around 7:50 a long, white sleek-looking train pulled up and we could see through the windows how comfortable it looked. Though this was not our train (it was still about 10 mins away), we were really starting to look forward to our trip! Well, you can imagine our surprise when the 8am train pulled up to the platform and it resembled something from the NY subway system.

 The inside was not much better.

Oh well. On the bright side, we were able to snag a couple of seats for the entire 4.5 hour trip - whew!! The trip was not too bad and was actually pretty scenic.

When we got to Taitung, we went directly to the rental car place and grabbed our car for the next 6 days – a SWEET Nissan Livina. Haha. It is sort of a cross between a Venza and a Corolla, big enough to fit all of our bags and the board.

 The drive from the bus station to the hotel was  pretty quick even with the speed limit being 60kph (about 37 mph). Driving here is interesting because there are scooters EVERYWHERE and everyone pretty much does whatever they want. Most of the streets signs are translated to English, however the translations are sometimes slightly different when looking at the map vs. looking at the actual signs. We were able to figure it out after a few wrong turns.

We got to our hotel, the Taitung Spring B&B, around 2pm. Our room was small but nice and the hotel was in a good location.

We checked in, dropped off our bags then headed out for lunch. Most of the signs are in Chinese, so it took some guesswork, but we stumbled upon a small restaurant that served jiaozhi (dumplings). We ordered a variety: pork, veggie, kimchi and leek, and we each got a black soymilk. Everything was REALLY tasty.

After we finished lunch, we decided to walk down to the nearest beach and check it out. The nearby beach was rocky and did not look that inviting. There wasn’t any surf either. We knew that there were better beaches just a few km north, so we figured that is probably where we would go. As we were walking back to town, we noticed some nasty looking clouds headed in our direction – more rain! We walked back to the hotel just as I started to feel the jetlag kicking in (what is it about 4:30pm??) and decided to chill for a little while before heading back out for dinner.

After dark is really when this town really livens up. There were crowds of people on every street as we walked around and checked out all of the food. We passed one restaurant that looked interesting, so we decided to give it a try. The menu was 100% in Chinese, so we sat there trying to grab someone’s attention to see if they could translate. Luckily, a really nice guy sitting across from us offered to translate the menu options.  So, he translated to Bernard and Bernard translated to me. It took us a little while to order, as you can imagine J  When we did, we ended up with two hot pots – Szechuan style for me (but of course) and a veggie for Bernard. We added in lamb, bok choy, leeks, and mushrooms. It was GOOD except I got the nice surprise of duck's blood in mine (it’s kind of jello-y and looks like liver). Bernard ate it for me and said it was benign and tasted fine.  They also had some sort of sweet cold tea, which was really yummy, and free ice cream.

Once we finished dinner, we decided to walk a few blocks up to the night market. Even though it was the small daily market, it was still pretty big. We quickly regretted having eaten so much for dinner, as there was so much to eat! We walked around, ate a few little treats and headed back to the hotel exhausted.

Tomorrow we check out a surf break up near Donghe and do some sightseeing up the coast!