Tales from Taiwan

Part I

It started, the way plenty of things do these days, with FOMO induced by scrolling through zealously curated social-media feeds.

A lot of people seem to be in Taiwan now, my brother remarked.

Yeah, I said. Kind of like Japan during sakura season. It’s like the new Hong Kong.

Maybe we should go.

Yeah.

And that was how we found ourselves with tickets to Taipei in July.

***

So it was going to be our first parent-free sibling trip overseas and I suspect our mother was secretly cackling with glee at the thought of having three kids out of the house at the same time.

As the eldest, I was going to have to assume the parental role, i.e. financier, by promising to cover all the accommodation expenses.

Since I had taken on Mom’s role, the brother stepped into the eldest kid’s: that of general bossy boots. I delegated the planning to him, and was pleasantly surprised to see that he shared a genetic predisposition for creating tidy itineraries in Excel. He even had a tab for a map of the metro system, bless his little heart.

The sister, lucky child, only had to be herself.

**

We do not enjoy visa-free access to Taiwan yet, but my old Schengen visa meant it was literally the work of a minute to register for an entry pass online. The siblings had to apply for a proper visa but it was a swift and painless process as well, and before we knew it, we were ready to go.

Only one decision remained: Which bear was going to come along? Was it the well-traveled Clancy, or were we going to give newbie Moses a chance?

In the end, we took both.

***

The low-cost carrier takes off on the dot – on. the. dot, what a miracle –  and makes a butter-smooth landing three hours later.

You slept through the lightning, sister informs us.

We shuffle bleary-eyed past immigration and on to baggage claim, but still don’t make it in time for the last bus trip to the city at 1 AM, which is a shame, because then it costs me over a thousand Taiwanese dollars in a cab driven by a perfectly polite gentleman without a lick of English.

(This is why you should have your hotel name and address in the local language handy.)

It’s almost 3 AM when we are cordially ushered into the lobby by the concierge and all at once my travel trauma begins to melt away.

The siblings are too busy connecting to the hotel Wi-Fi to appreciate the subtleties of refinement, but we all agree, once we enter our 12th-floor haven, that we deeply appreciate the beds.