I can’t help but feel disappointed that I didn’t take anywhere near as many photos on my camera as I usually do. I think it’s a number of factors, of course we were only gone for a short trip but most of the time it was in Taipei, which is a big city like Tokyo, or Bangkok. There weren’t a lot of interesting activities to take photos of besides our trip out to Taroko Gorge. For our next vacation, I really want to limit the amount of time spent in a large city and more time out in the country exploring nature and stuff. The eating experience in our trips is like 90% of the reason we do these trips as you’ve seen on my Instagram. I had a hard time this time finding activities to fill in between meals while in Taipei. There’s only so many makeup stores a boyfriend can handle waiting in for unending periods of time without going insane.

I’d also really like to upgrade from my Canon Rebel T4i. It’s been a faithful companion the last 5 years where I learned to shoot in manual mode, edit RAW files, and try different lenses but the bulk is getting to me. Joanna has a Pixel 2 phone now and it’s so convenient to pull out and shoot quickly.

Can you tell this was shot on a cell phone camera?

I’d love it if Canon came out with a good mirrorless option but realistically, I may have to switch to Sony :/

During this vacation, I really enjoyed using Mandarin again. I didn’t practice or review at all before coming here and I was able to communicate enough to know what was going on most of the time. I told Joanna that this felt special because it showed all the hard work I put in over 3 ½ years in undergrad over 8 years ago and it’s still ingrained in me. I’d love to refresh my skills or even learn a new language like Japanese. Maybe in the future. One thing I found frustrating this week is that it’s a common Asian American problem of not being able to read and write since growing up all you did was speak with your older family members. Joanna and I were able to communicate verbally but reading signs or menus was hard sometimes when Google wasn’t able to figure it out.

One game I enjoy playing is what I call Menu Roulette. It’s when you have a menu in a different language and don’t have an English option. You choose something randomly and hope that it’s something edible. The other day I picked some sort of dumpling for breakfast and got pan fried pork dumplings which worked out.

Ok enough rambling. After my very restful 1 hour nap at the hostel, we packed everything up and headed to the train station to catch the airport bus. Flight to Shanghai was no problem. Layover was about 3 hours. We wandered around looking for a place to hang out for a bit. I noticed that one of the small snack shops was selling tiny overpriced Hagen Daaz ice cream cups. My sister worked as a raw materials buyer last year for Hagen Daaz and told me that if I find the green tea mochi flavor, I need to try it because she sourced the matcha powder and mochi for it. It was $5 but I liked it, wish we had more Asian inspired flavors like this at home.

Our flight to LAX was at 9pm, I was really happy to find out that it wasn’t a fully packed flight. When they announced that the cabin doors had closed, a game of musical chairs began. We asked the guy sitting next to us to move in the row behind so we could have the whole section. There was a very tall American guy who asked if he could have the whole row in front of us to himself because he’s 6’11”. Apparently he’s a former NBA player and now motivational speaker who gave a talk in Hong Kong on his way home. I looked him up, his name is Chad Varga and used to play for the Dallas Mavericks.

Total flight was 12 hours but it felt like 2 ½ because we fell asleep and woke up with 2 hours left and got fed breakfast.

When we were approaching LA, we flew past the forest fires and it was so surreal. There were these huge clouds of thick reddish black smoke with everything black and charred on the ground. You could actually see active fires as well. I’m really thankful that we decided not to do our original vacation plan of driving from LA to SF, who knows what would have happened.

The tough part of the trip home was that we had an 8 hour layover in LAX which was alleviated by going to the Delta club in Terminal 2. We paid the $60 for the daily pass and was granted entry into an oasis within the airport. I put my name down right away to take a shower and felt so much less grimey afterwards. They had an open bar along with a salad bar and soup as well. Someone got a little bit too comfortable hanging out there.

The flight home wasn’t until 12:30 am, unfortunately it felt longer than our 12 hour flight from Shanghai. Given how smoothly the entire trip went, I think these were minor issues but still bugged me.

I called Delta about the stuff that we experienced and they were happy to give us 10,000 miles as an apology. 10k miles is around $100ish depending how you use the miles. I think this is fair considering our tickets round trip to LA were $250.

So we’re home now. We headed to the airport at 9pm central time on Friday night and didn’t get home until 8am Sunday morning, so that’s about 36 hours door to door. According to my fitbit we walked 143,697 steps or 64.03 miles.

There’s still a lot to check out in Taiwan like the western and southern coasts but with only 6 days I didn’t want to feel like we were rushing and getting stressed out in the process.

I’m really thankful everything went super smoothly. Joanna’s definitely caught the travel bug and is excitedly talking about checking out South Korea, New Zealand, and going back to Japan.

Thanks for following along this week!