I would start off with a lovely cliche like ‘ after months of planning we heading off on our trip to Vietnam’, but one, that's not really the case, since the months leading up to the trip I was fairly preoccupied trying to get enough money together, and two, it sounds like the start of a really boring travel blog, so I’ll just scrap the shitty introducing line because you already know I’m in Vietnam or else you wouldn't be reading this.
The flights me and Donal booked where, on first impressions, the bum deals, with two 20 hour stop overs in Amsterdam and Taipei, but actually turned out to be okay because it meant we had a night in each city to have a look around. I’d been to Amsterdam before, but it was nice to be back, even it was only a quick visit. Our Flight arrived in the evening, so we put our bags in lockers at the airport and went into the city center to have a look around.
I was adamant that I’d have a smoke, despite not really smoking anymore apart from the odd pass when i’m drinking. I bought a pure of white widdow, and after smoking less than half of it, I was fairly stoned, and remembered why I stopped smoking, I don't really enjoy being stoned anymore. Hopefully I’ll come around, and when I’m old I’ll be a stoner grandad that smoke shitloads of grass at inapropriate events like a granddaughter's christening and all the parents have to try awkwardly explain why grandads cigarettes smell funny. Anyway, we went to have a look around the red light district, because Donal had never, been, and as I remembered, it was weird, really weird. It's hard to give out about it, because it definitely has its positives in terms of bringing the industry above board, making it safer for everyone, especially and more importantly the sex workers, but there's still something quite sad about it all. Apart from my obvious aversion to women pushing their tits up against the glass and telling you to come in, i had very mixed feeling about it all, feelings which i hope would be similar if it were men knocking on the windows at me instead of women.
On the one hand I felt it might be quite progressive and even empowering in a weird sort of way that if women wanted to do this then they could in a very open and probably much safer environment. On the other hand feeling that it couldn't possibly be empowering, supposing that these women couldn't possibly want, to work at this and that if this was the legal side of the industry, was there a far more sinister side of the industry behind closed doors that's only furthered by the size of the legal industry. It’s something I definitely don't know enough about to have an educated opinion on, but wandering around there on a tuesday night with crowds of creepy looking men out window shopping, was certainly a catalyst for thought on the matter. After the emotional rollercoaster and reaffirmation of my sexuality that was the red light district, which by the way wasn't helped by it being the first time i had been proper stoned in a good while, we got some some class falafels and headed back to the airport to sleep on the ground.
Despite having no sort of bedding and wearing shorts, the cold tiles weren't so bad, for all of the 2 and a half hours sleep we got before being woken up by a lovely lady explaining to us that nobody is allowed to sleep on the ground after 5 am. Another hour of sleep in a chair, one really shit expensive coffee later and we were good to go. We went back into the city in the morning for another look around during the day and then back out to the Airport to get our flight to Taipei.
After our 15 hours of flying, one stop in bangkok to refuel, plenty of free wine and some awful gluten free ‘special’ meals, we arrived in Taipei. We had planned on sleeping in the airport again since our flight was at 8 the next morning, but after finding out our flight had been pushed back to the afternoon because of a typhoon, we decided to get a cheap hostel for the night, have a look around taipei and then actually catch up on some sleep.
Once we got off the bus into the city we were the obvious tourists wandering around staring up at the sheer scale of the place and in awe of the unnecessarily big train station, like its just a giant room inside that you could fit a few large aircraft, there's really no need lads. We walked to our hostel, and it became fairly apparent why loads of people wear face masks, theres loads of pollution, or more accurately, it smells like shit.
After finding our teeny tiny ‘sleepbox’ we left our stuff and headed out to get something to eat, despite the advice of the guy in the hotel who told us we should stay inside because the typhoon was coming. We explained that we needed to eat, typhoon or no typhoon, and he told us to be back by ten, because it would get really crazy after then, thanks mom. Reluctant to withdraw money since we were only there for one short ‘be home by ten’ sorta night, we eventually found a food hall that took card in the equivalent of arnotts but with a million stories, and it was fairly shite, as you’d expect from the arnotts food hall. I had read that the night markets in Taipei are pretty cool, so we got a train a little out of the center to the shilin market.
The food stalls and street food was pretty cool, but the rest was just shitty fun fair stalls and shrimp fishing, which was pretty gas to be honest.
We headed home pretty early because firstly we were pretty tired, and secondly it had started to piss rain, so we figured the typhoon was on the way and didn't want to be stranded ages away from our hostel. The next morning I woke up to a message from Emilyrose in our group chat asking if me and Donal were okay, saying that her and calvin had heard about the train explosion in Taipei. This was news to us, so I googled it and found out that the explosion, leading to 21 being hospitalised had happened at the same time we were on the train home, just on a different line, not far from where we were.
Witnesses said that a middle aged man got onto the train, put a long black parcel on the ground, then got off the train. Shortly after, a few explosions went off and the carriage burst into flames. Police found remnants of a fire cracker, which would fit the description of the long black parcel, but said it wouldn't account for all of the damage and that there must of been more explosives on the carriage. It was a really fucking weird feeling to wake up to, and certainly not something that's on our radar in Ireland. There is however a touch of humor in there being a typhoon and a bomb explosion all in the one night we were in Taipei. A little weirded out by the bomb, we then ran around for an hour trying to find the bus station, because just to make things fun for us, there's a few taipei main stations, everyone gave different directions, and of course, the big building that says Taipei bus station is actually a fucking hotel. One guy even even told us not to go to the airport as there was no flights today. After eventually finding the bus which takes the guts of an hour, two hours before our flight, we hopped on and just made it to the airport on time, of course it ended up being delayed because of the backlog after the typhoon, and of course we would have had time to eat before we got onto our last flight into Hanoi. But then of course we wouldn't have had to eat that sweet sweet China Airlines plane food that gave us the shits before we even got into Vietnam. Of course.
