Friday 7/8
The most exciting thing about landing in Taiwan is not Taiwan, but seeing E greeting us at the airport! He flew in from Saigon a few hours earlier, joining us for this vacation.
Second on the list of exciting thing about Taiwan is meeting T’s friends. They have a nice big van that took us to our hotel. The freeway we took looked pretty much like the US, but when we stopped for food (T’s friend kindly took us to get food) at a small night market, it was not at all like the US. It was close to 11pm and lots of people were around. T’s friends bought us several items to try, which turned out to be the most well-known ones that we later saw in other night markets – oyster 
pancake thing, fried squid, beef noodle soup, ice cream wrapped in mochi skin thing, and some boba drinks. We were tired, so we took the food and ate at the hotel. It felt good to relax and enjoy the goodies on this first night in Taiwan.
This is the oyster pancake thing with gravy on top. All take-out foods are put into these types of boxes.
This is soup put into a bag for take-out. Gravy is packaged this way too.
Our first hotel in Taipei, the Yomi. I’ll give it 3 1/2 stars.