After multiple loads of laundry, including all the sofa cushion covers, I felt ready to integrate back into society. We rang up our buddies, the Roy’s, from our days when we lived in Taiwan for a year and headed to our beloved Taiwan metro. In the metro, we were immediately struck by a sight we have never seen before in Taipei — an empty platform! Not only that, we had to wait over 7 minutes for the next train! In the past we complained if we had to wait over two minutes for a train. Oh, how times have changed.
One hour later, we put glass, steel and concrete behind us as the large and luscious greenery of Tianmu Park and our friends Julien, Chloé and Emma welcomed us back. The mozzies were thrilled to see us, too.
It was pretty clear after this hike that our next urban adventure would have to involve lots of air conditioning. Praise be to Ashley, Johnny and Alex for inviting us to the Grand Hyatt Taipei for an illicit dinner in their suite.
Taiwan is currently under a soft lockdown with COVID cases topping 31 per day in the past week in a country of 24 million. Yes, you read that right. With level 3 restrictions in place no more than 4 persons are allowed to be indoors at a given time. This makes it essentially impossible for us to have meals with our friends, since we’re never allowed to take our masks off outdoors. So, there are a couple choices. One, we visit our friends in their home and hope that the neighbors don’t rat us out, an unfortunate but common occurrence here during the pandemic. Two, you have friends who can book a hotel suite for a night and order room service. Since we had five in the room, Johnny hid in the shower stall when room service knocked. This holiday has made my nerves a bit raw.
