Taiwan in Five Days Part 1

I never thought I would travel to an Asian country. Maybe because it would be a very long trip to any destination in Asia. Or maybe because the language is so different compared to European countries. Reading a sign, or anything for that matter, could be a problem.
Also, when I travel to a country I like to try to learn some basics of the language. How could I possibly learn any Chinese?

Well, leave it to my husband to expand my horizons. He had the idea in his head that he wanted to travel to every continent on the globe. Guess what? Asia is a continent. That is how I found myself taking a trip to Taiwan.

Our trip was a spur of the moment thing without a lot of advanced planning. It was a total of only five days. The worst part of the trip was the flight, which took around fourteen hours. That's way too long to be on a plane.

We decided to stay in Taipei and use that as our base, taking day trips if we wanted to explore. Taipei is a typical city. Lots of people, lots of buildings, lots of traffic. We used the subway, the MRT, to get around the city. It is very clean and efficient and it was convenient to our hotel. There was an entrance to go underground just a few doors from the hotel. I cut the photo below just to show the cleanliness of the cars. This was the norm.

The hotel we chose was Hotel 73 in the Zhongzheng District. It was a small hotel and our room was small but had a comfortable bed, a TV, a nice bathroom and was very clean. What I enjoyed most was the breakfast. There was a mixture of Chinese dishes and regular American/European type breakfast food. It was a terrific opportunity to try new types of food. The presentation was impressive. It was arranged beautifully and tasted great.

The hotel service was excellent, from the front desk to the breakfast service and everyone was very polite. Also the rates were reasonable. We had no trouble communicating. Many of the people in the city know English. It turned out to be a great choice, as we are always economy-minded and it  worked out well as far as getting around to other areas. I would highly recommend this hotel to anyone traveling to Taipei. I am including a link below to the hotel website.
 
https://ww.hotel73.com/en/

The photos below show the entrance, lobby, our room, bathroom, breakfast buffet and some of the food. We visited Taiwan in 2018.

 The next installment will be about some of the sites around the city of Taipei. Until then, happy traveling (virtual or otherwise).