The bus? No English? No Problem!

The Taipei bus system has been something that I've always been wary of.  Subways and trains I have no problem with because there's usually plenty of English, and the stops are really obvious.  On buses, there's a lower frequency rate, and you can easily take the wrong way and end up somewhere random.  There's also the added complexity of knowing when you have to get off.

The buses in Taiwan usually have almost no English, and the maps are all in Chinese.  There's an LED ticker at the front of some buses.  Sometimes there's English and sometimes not.  So you can see why I'd be apprehensive about taking the bus.  However, from Friday nights bus adventure I thought I'd give it a try because Anne said that it's more fun riding a bus because you can see stuff outside.  Plus, a lot of the time it's cheaper (MRT = ~$0.80, BUS = ~$0.5 of course depending on where you get on/off).

For starters, Google Maps is amazing.  Simply brilliantly executed.  On my phone I entered where I wanted to go, and within a few seconds it had several routes mapped out for me.  I chose the "least transfers" route and waited in front of my building for Bus 642

This is actually a picture of the bus stop at my destination but I thought it made a better first image for the blog post

Picture of the front of the National Taipei University at Gonguan MRT station

I've reached my destination:  Guang Hua Digital Plaza

Google Maps magically knows when you've boarded your bus, and as you move along in traffic, the little blue arrow moves you along your route.  There's also an extremely handy little interface that shows you each of the bus stops, it's name (usually in Chinese), but the most important part is that as you pass each stop, the interface updates and you can see exactly how many stop you have until your destination.  It's brilliant!

Mug shot for the fans

Out front of the Digital Plaza was a little market going on.  Lots of hand made goods including soap, honey bee farmers, fruit vendors, tea and medicinal vendors, candles, garlic, watermelons, the whole gamut.

There was even some Chinese belly dancing going on.  A crowd had gathered to watch including this man and his cute little white dog.  Pics for you mom.  Sorry it's hard to be sneaky with this crappy phone camera!

I should have mentioned, the reason I went out this day was because I had no plans during the day, and I needed a bunch of stuff for around the house.  Guang Hua Digital Plaza (at Zhongshan Xinsheng station) is the best place in Taipei for cheap technology.  I wanted to pick up 4GB of RAM for my computer because it runs a tad slow at home.  Also I needed a headset/mic for Skype, a webcam, and a DVI to HDMI adapter to hook my computer up to our flatscreen.

My faithful companion makes another appearance

Found some great deals.  Ram was only $45 for the 2 sticks of 2GB.  Webcam: $17.  headset with mic: $10. DVI to HDMI adapter: $1.50.  It's fun because you can barter with the merchants at this place, and because there's 100's of small shops crammed into this 4 story tall mall, everything is really competitively priced.

Now that my bus confidence was up, I decided to try and take another bus to Ikea.  I had never been to Ikea before and I knew it wasn't so close to an MRT station so bus actually made sense in this case.  I punched Ikea into Google Maps on my phone and followed the GPS prompts to find the bus stop.  The bus stops in this area are located in the middle of the road, and the bus has it's own dedicated lane.  It confused the heck out of me at first and I ended up doing almost a full circle of the block trying to figure out how to get into the middle of the road after realizing it wasn't along the side of the road as usual.

The bus dropped us off in the middle of the road in front of the Taipei Arena.  Massive LED screen out front showing commercials and adds for The Avengers and Battleship.  There must have been some student event going on because there were floods of uniformed students pouring into the arena.

Around the corner from the arena was the Ikea!  The multi-national flags out front helped me find the entrance.  This whole Ikea is located underground.  The inside is basically the exact same as any Ikea I've ever been to with the exception of 60% of the signage being Chinese only.

After some deliberation I bought a large floor lamp (one of those 4 feet tall paper ones), an 18 piece dish set (heavy!), a toilet brush, shower curtain rod, and a cutlery set (it's difficult to find cutlery in the stores around town that I've checked).  I stuffed everything into a large Ikea bag and headed back outside.  The plates, cutlery, and lamp were quite heavy so I punched in Qizhang station (home) into Google Maps, and selected "least walking" as my parameter.

As instructed, I found a different bus stop and waited for the 1802 bus which took me all the way back to Zhongshan MRT station where I then transfered into the MRT and made my way back home!  Very minimal walking!

Big shout out goes to Google for not being evil and providing all these amazing services for free.  And also another props to Anne for convincing me that the bus is easy.

Lastly, for all you dog lovers out there, snapped this from the bus :)