Taipei Diaries

As I look across the aisle of the MRT train at the young girl with the gnarled toes peeking over the edge of her men’s style flip-flops, I ponder my situation.  How is it I came to this place?  Had I made the right decision?  Perhaps, perhaps not.  That is something that time will tell.

The MRT is one of the best things about living in Taipei, in my personal opinion.  A network of cheap, fast transportation to just about anywhere in town.  Of course it was also helpful to have a station approximately thirty seconds from my front door, practically a luxury in a dense city like Taipei. 

Living in a city with a population in the millions is not an easy thing to do.  But living in a city with millions of people that aren’t speaking the same language as you, both literally and figuratively, is a whole new level of difficult.

The train began to slow, preparing to enter the next station.  A woman’s voice politely calls out the station name in Chinese, English, and Taiwanese.  I stand from my coveted seat on the crowded train, another passenger quickly sliding into it, and prepare to depart the train. 

I am on my way to the fabric market.  An almost weekly trip for me.  I say the fabric market, but it’s actually a three to four block neighborhood packed with craft stores carrying everything you would need to make literally anything.  Although a fair amount of my days are spent in the classroom and doing Chinese homework, I am a crafter by nature, and what free time I do have I like to spend creating something. 

The Taipei main station is a crowded hub of mass transport that can easily confuse and discombobulate the unsuspecting traveler.  It took me a fair number of passes through the junction before I was able to navigate it with some certainty.  I remember one of my first times ending up in the train station of Taipei city, not entirely sure how I got there, and not at all sure how to get back.  I gave up after about twenty minutes of walking around and finally got a taxi home. 

Taxis are by far my preferred mode of transport, even though they take longer with the traffic.  But they are also far more expensive than the MRT.  An MRT ride that costs 25 NT ( less than a dollar) could cost as much as 300 NT ( 9 bucks) in a taxi.  I’ve always been the kind of girl that would rather spend my dad’s hard earned money on shopping as opposed to taxi rides.