Even though we stayed with relatives the whole time we were in Taiwan, I’m glad I made the decision to spend the first 2 nights at a little teeny tiny hotel to deal with our jet lag. When we have no agenda and I’m the sole parent, I do very well with the kids . It’s why I love traveling with them. I get to boss them around all by myself!
Itinerary: check out of hotel.
Wow, this is a day where we truly did nothing. In the morning the children woke up way too early. First we wasted time by taking showers. Have I mentioned the hotel has a rain shower? I need to get one of those for my house. It’s much easier for the kids when they take showers. Then it was bright enough to walk to a local 7-11 to get breakfast at 6am.
We walked to a traditional market where everyone was just starting to set up shop, sat down on the sidewalk and ate our breakfast there. I asked a vendor where to find a traditional Chinese breakfast (soymilk, Chinese churro etc), and was shocked to be told that I’d have to walk really far away for that. Thinking back, I don’t see too many of those storefronts anymore walking around.
I asked my cousin later and she confirmed that there are now more “Western” style breakfast places, at least around where we are. Because we’re close to universities and students wake up late and breakfast sandwiches are cheaper. I also noticed a lot more Western style breakfast places like Starbucks and similar coffee shops. Kind of sad.
We played at the playground close to the market till some crazy lady decided to walk around the playground with a cigarette. She did not take the hint when I told Thumper we should leave because there is someone smoking. Smoking is not allowed on playgrounds. Signs are posted.
So we walked back to the hotel and used the free laundry machine on the 5th floor. This took us the next 3 hours because it took so long for the laundry to dry in the small dryer. The kids were very bored watching TV all that time. At the end, because checkout was 12pm, I had to take the half-wet laundry out.
We stowed our luggage with the front desk and had lunch at a dimsum place on 永康街, a famous eatery street. The place was called Kao Tai or something like that. We had “bun”-stickers and shumai. It was just okay for me.
After that we took the taxi to my aunt’s house, took a nap, then went out to dinner at a porridge
shop, which was kind of take out style. It was super delicious and Astroboy ate a full bowl of the sweet yam porridge. We stayed and waited for my 3rd aunt to show up and chatted with her before we went home to go to sleep.
It was kind of nice to do nothing for a day. Except for the fact that the kids watched a lot of TV. On the other hand, I was thinking back to how much Astroboy’s Chinese has improved over the last week. I was all ready to credit it to the immersion environment, till I realized that we’ve been watching 2 hours of TV a day in general, anytime there is a downtime and we can’t do anything else. Astroboy is a bit too young for doodling for long periods and he’s watched a lot of Chiao Hu.
