5 May 2023
First class cake experience
Taipei to Yilan on the Tze-Chiang Limited Express
Now I am in Yilan. I have not been here before.
To get here I went all out and bought a first class ticket for the just over 1 hour journey. This comes with a meal of sorts, a hot meal if you travel at meal times, just a snack outside of meal times.
My hotel here seems great, it is on top of a Louisa coffee, which is basically a Taiwanese copy of Starbucks, the hotel actually belongs to the same people that own the coffee franchise, as I checked in with the barista, and my breakfast vouchers that I will not use are for the coffee shop.
The best news of all though, I am now no longer being bombarded by the signal from 100 or more other wifi networks, and my wireless mouse works again, and the internet works properly at 100mbit. The experience at the other hotel in relation to this was surreal, not only was the wifi hopeless, my watch was disconnecting from my phone, and like I said, there was sometimes a 10 second lag from moving my mouse to seeing it move on the screen. OK that's enough of that, I need to add silly comments about a couple of photos and then go and find out where the hell I am.
My train was not until 2pm! I had the whole day to waste, so of course I went out at 6am to walk around, here is the view from a conveniently placed overpass.
Today's incense burner, conveniently located on the roadside so you can do drive by burning of your rubbish.
This is shoe street. Hence the shoe. Umbrella street is elsewhere, so all those umbrellas are false advertising.
I had time to head to a park to try and centre myself for a geometrically perfect shot, failed.
In the park is this setup declaring that the President should step down and Taiwan should be returned to the aboriginal people of Taiwan.
A rare thing, I ate a normal lunch! Well, as in I ate a sit down meal for lunch instead of a muesli bar while hiking. I braved the sneeze buffet and assembled a mushroom dense vegan meal.
Now for a really bad shot of the inside of my first class train carriage. I am on the side of the aisle with only 1 seat. Very spacious.
Here is my meal kit with 2 small cakes. Strangely they are not both pineapple cakes (the Taiwanese traditional cake), one of them is an apple cake.
This is the slow train I was on. It looks like a bullet train, but it is not, the rails on this side of the island cannot accommodate fast trains, much of the line is very slow.
And here is my hotel room. Everything about it is better than the last one, but as discussed above, primarily the fact that the internet works properly!