Taiwan Money is "funny"

Where in the World is D today?

Trying to get tiny little brain around Taiwan money?



OK, if you’re one of my Facebook buddies you have no doubt seen the recent pictures I posted there are some you have questions about a few of them. If you’re not on Facebook I posted a few of them here. Let’s begin with the bottle of water that costs $45. That’s an easy one to explain but took too much time for FB. In Taiwan, they do not have cents. EVERYTHING is dollars. The Taiwan/U.S. exchange rate is about 33-1. So that very large water bottle (about 1 1/3 liters) cost about $1.20 in U.S. money. Not a bad deal. But my eyes just about popped out of my head when the clerk told me it was $45 dollars. (Just for the record that was about 15 min. after getting to Taichung, henceforth known as “The Chinese Freddie Kruger Van Ride Incident!” So, I was feeling a bit traumatized.)





Now on to the pictures of me make those awful faces. I get my $45 bottle of water and go up to my room in Taichung. I’m tired, I’m traumatized, It’s 1:30 in the morning, I’ve been traveling in one form or another like 22 hours and I have to get up in 2 hours to go to Taipei to pick up someone from the hotel. (That someone is Josh, my roommate.) So I fall onto the worlds hardest bed set the alarm on my phone and proceed to restlessly toss and turn for 2 hrs. I go into the bathroom and step into a small puddle from a leaky toilet. Ugh! Wet socks suck. Anyway, so I don’t have the energy to dig through my carry-on to find my toothbrush. I just want to scrape off some off the scum off my tongue. Thus I proceed to grab a hotel toothbrush off the counter. The first 5 seconds or so go as planed, then this thing starts to foam up. Cool! It has some sort of built in toothpaste. About another 10 seconds pass and my taste buds go into high alert.





That was the nastiest stuff I have tasted in ………. Gosh I can’t remember the last time I tasted something so horrible. So why on earth did I stop to take pictures, because the whole event is just to surreal to not document. But the problem with taking the extra time to grab my camera is it takes that much MORE effort to get the taste out of my mouth. There a picture after every time I rinsed my mouth. Not to mention that I was totally paranoid about rinsing my mouth with water. The whole thing about don’t drink the water applies here and I wasn’t about to use my $45 bottle of water to rinse and spit! It took about 5 pieces of gum to give my taste buds some relief.

As I recall all of this I can’t help but laugh. It’s all SOOOO ridiculous! And every word is absolutely truly. Yes, I have been know to ‘occaisionally’ embellish a story to make it more interesting, but I really didn’t do it here. All of these things did indeed happen all within a 6 hrs. period of landing in Taiwan.

Next Stop… Fun with food!