第二日

If getting up at 5:30 am and wandering around a foreign city for 3 hours doesn't sound like something you would do on your first day in said foreign city we're clearly not on the same page.
Truth be told, I wasn't planning on doing anything quite that extreme, but who am I to argue with The Lag on my first day? So get up I did, riding the elevator down from our 8th floor hotel room and facing early morning Taipei head-on. And what to mine wandering eyes should appear but what would turn out to be the first of hundreds of 7-11s I would see in Taiwan!

Said 7-11, shown here with Melissa, my roommate. The rainbow-headed marsupial (??) is the 7-11 mascot.

After bewildering the morning staff with my extensive tour of the store I set out again, picking a direction and walking until I felt like turning. Annoyingly enough I didn't have the presence of mind to take any pictures on this first excursion, but the sights I saw included

• Employees in matching uniforms doing their morning calisthenics in time to an incredibly loud radio.
• A great fruit stand! I bought a fruit that I had never seen before and it was delicious! Like a peach with the texture of an apple.

• Scooters scooters scooters bus scooters car scooters

I'm sure there were massive amounts of wonderful things that went unnoticed, but sensory overload and delirious happiness are cruel masters and sacrifices have to be made.

After a stroke of pure luck I ended up back at the hotel and bought myself some brekkies in the 7-11 - a pastry of some sort and some chocolate milk. Hard to go wrong there.
No picture of the food, but here's our hotel (right) and the apartment building we face(left).

In the morning we had some orientation with the MCU staff and a session on Foreigners in Taiwan, which was interesting. But even more interesting was the lunch we were given after that! The dishes were set on a huge Lazy Susan and shared - these picture don't even show half of the dishes we ended up getting.Our table -the two staff members with us were really great about explaining how to eat everything (harder than you might think)!

Later we met up with some students from MCU's chapter of people to people for some sightseeing. Our group (led by the super friendly Wendy and Abby) went to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Pictures incoming, cap'n. Sorry about the quality, the mood lighting was pretty extreme.Anyway, I thought most of the art was great and hanging out with Wendy and Abby was super fun! All in all, a raging success. We headed back to campus and after some group discussions we were set free for the rest of the day!
Q: What do you do in Taipei any time from 4 pm to 3 am?
A: HIT THE NIGHT MARKET
Shilin Night Market is the biggest in Taipei and it is absolutely insane. Imagine a huge festival full of booths and games and food that thousands of people flock to every night. Seriously, this was Wednesday night, not exactly party central most of the time. It is, dare I say it, a school night!! But this place was just a crazy whirlwind of colors and sounds and smells (STINKY TOFU my olifactory nemisis) from dusk till well near dawn. Again with the sensory overload excuse for a lack of pictures but here's a t-shirt I came really close to buying that counts because it was at the market.
And as the shirt says, we did! First dinner in Taiwan, the only logical option for sustenance is a whole octopus flayed and grilled!

This isn't the whole thing, it was chopped up. BE IMPRESSED.

Also notice the ever-present bubble tea in the background. A+ for the bubble tea, but octopus remains noticably absent from my index of favorite food.

Dazzled as we were by the night market, it was only about 10:30 so it was decided we would all take a trip to Taiwan's tallest: Taipei 101! We hopped on the train and after about 10 minutes it shone out like a beacon amongst dozens of smaller beacons, all putting on light shows. Pretty dazzling, but nature called and we decided to pay a visit to the bathroom inside the mall in the bottom of TP101.
Oh wait, Susi, (you may be saying) did you get the impression that we cared about your BMs in Taiwan? Well I'M GETTING TO THE POINT so be patient for about 20 more words, it gets good. Anyway, the bathroom had not only non-squatting toilets but also toilet paper, so I thought things were going pretty well. The problem started when I left the bathroom and noticed that nobody from my group was still around! I checked Swatch and D&G and all the other classy stores that populated this mall but alas, nary a white person in sight, much less one that I knew.
So, after waiting around for about 20 minutes, Susi's Great Solo Adventure began! Sure, I could have gone straight back to the hotel, but what kind of lame butt would that make me? Off I wandered into the night and in I wandered into 7-11 for a snack. (I'm probably not exaggerating when I say you can't wander for more than 10 minutes without hitting a 7-11 in Taipei.) Getting a kit-kat or choco milk wouldn't have been appropriate for SGSA, so I decided to experiment.
The experiment: Asparagus juice.
Hypothesis: GROSS

Conclusion:Hypothesis confirmed!

After some more aimless wandering I managed to find the metro station and headed back to our corner of town to hit up the night market a bit more before seeing if the others had made it back to the hotel. It was here I realized that what I had thought was the night market was, in fact, only a tiny portion thereof! This thing goes on for aaaages.

IT IS GREAT AND I AM GOING EVERY NIGHT

After some more wide-eyed exploration I remembered that I should probably check in to the hotel so nobody would get the impression I had been murdered in a ditch so I headed back to the hotel where everybody was very pleased to see me and we all had a good laugh. THE END of day 2.