I went to taiwan quite a while ago now. Everyone always says how friendly the locals are in the places they visit (except paris, obviously) but on several different occasions in different parts of the island the response to us trying and failing to ask questions or buy stuff was one of the staff or customers leaning out of a window and shouting a bit, and then someone else coming in off the street to translate for us.

The food was great, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, but one thing I particularly liked were these fast food stands where you grabbed a small basket and picked some ingredients, which tended to be fairly common to all the stands, but then you’d hand the basket over and some process would be applied to the things you picked and each time the effect was different. Sometimes it was a soup, sometimes a stir fry, sometimes it would be astonishingly spicy. I’m guessing now with readily available translation software on everyone’s smartphones some of the surprise would be taken away.

We saw far less than I’d have liked, and I should go back again before tensions with china ratchet up too high.