Wednesday February 9, 2011
Taipei – Epilogue
I’ve been back in Taipei for a couple of days already. I got back on Monday evening and I went to work on Tuesday. Today is my second day of work, and it isn’t very exciting. As I expected, it felt very strange to arrive back in Taipei after my 8 days off. My apartment felt very small and dark and unpleasant after all the open spaces of the mountains. And sitting at my desk at work seems rather boring.
I spent a very pleasant day in Pingling on the last day of my holidays. I hung out in downtown Pingling in the morning drinking coffee and checking out all the big motorcycles. Then I had to check out of my hotel. I packed up everything and then drove the short distance to the tea museum. I left my big backpack at the front office and went through the museum. It was much nicer than I expected. It wasn’t large, but it had a lot of good information about tea. The best thing about the museum was they had full-scale models of people working in the tea fields. They looked very realistic to me, and I took a bunch of photos of them.
A man was cooking delicious fried snacks in the parking lot near my scooter, and I got breakfast from him. Then I wandered around Pingling taking pictures from the bridges and from a big statue on a hill. As I said, it’s a lovely town, and I could have spent all day there. Eventually, the time came to start heading back to Taipei. On my way, I was surprised to see a bunch of new businesses in Pingling. So things are changing and nice little restaurants and cafes were opening up.
The drive back to Taipei was lots of fun, though I had to keep my eyes open for crazy drivers. I thought there would be a lot of traffic, but the roads were largely empty and I raced along. Even the streets in Taipei were empty, and I did a steady 60-70 km/hr all the way through the city back to where I live. People often say that it is a good feeling to arrive home again after a trip. I didn’t have that feeling at all. I wasn’t happy to be back at all. I could easily have just kept traveling and never returned.