I still remember the first time I ever ate a Taiwanese pineapple cake. I was at my friend’s house one evening watching old movies during my college days, and her mom came into the living room and presented a box of beautiful, individually wrapped pineapple cakes. A family friend had recently come back from Taiwan and gave her this box as a gift from her travels. The orange boxes were like mini 3D castles, and once you undid the origami-like paper box, a single wrapped pineapple cake was inside, waiting to be consumed. I undid the box, then the wrapping, to reveal a perfect, light golden rectangular cake. I bit into it, and the inside was a faint orange-yellow color, sweet and chewy, with a hint of tanginess. And the pastry on the outside was buttery, rich, and flaky. I ate it in about four delicious bites. I felt a bit greedy and was tempted to ask for another one, but I resisted and allowed the taste to linger in my mouth.

I’d never had an Asian dessert like that before. And the next time I went into an Asian supermarket, I looked to see if I could find a similar one. The markets I visited in Boston did have them, but they barely had any pineapple in them, and the flavor and texture was so inferior. It was like having the cheapest possible version of the luxurious bites I had that night at my friend’s house, and I was repeatedly disappointed.

So this trip, I made a list of the four brands to look out for, and I ended up buying three of them. Sunny Hills and Chia Te were Saturday morning destinations for us, and Sunny Hills was so fancy that they invited us in at opening time for a whole, free complimentary cake, with a lovely little cup of oolong tea. Chia Tea was a bit more on the stingy side, as they didn’t even allow us a half-bite sample. But I bought them anyway. And I loved both for different reasons. The Sunny Hills cake had the deepest and richest pineapple flavor, but the Chia Te cake had a smoother and richer texture. Pineapple cakes in Taiwan have yet to be replicated elsewhere — in my heart or in my mouth.

We spent the day yesterday exploring Kaohsiung and decided to go out to Cijin (or Qijin) Island to explore Kaohsiung’s land of water, sand, and shells. We rented a small motorized golf-like cart for two hours and sped around on the buggy roads. We even took it off the designated roads against the rules and drove through the street markets with it, buying mango smoothies and more mango smoothies. The time finally came to go back to the city, and lo and behold, there were no cabs to be seen anywhere. We tried requesting an Uber, and none would come all the way out to Cijin after multiple timed out requests. Then, we tried calling our hotel to ask them to get a cab to come out to get us, but they told us that would take time, and we’d be charged for the cab’s journey out to get us and back into the city. We kept looking at the streets futilely, and no cabs.

Finally, we decided to ask a random person for help. I walked into the nearest hole-in-the-wall restaurant, where I told the men working there that I needed a cab to go back into Kaohsiung and asked what they’d suggest. I said I tried looking but couldn’t find them anywhere. One of the workers went into his drawer to see if they had a business card of someone who could drive us, but he couldn’t find it. Then another man said he might have a friend who would be able to help. And then out of nowhere, someone he knows drove his scooter up to the front of the restaurant, and he asked this guy if he could help search the streets looking for a cab driver to bring me back to Kaohsiung. The man dutifully and without hesitation agreed and said he’d be right back, and he scoots away. The man in the restaurant said there are usually cabs on Cijin, but because it’s prime dinner time, all the cabbies must be eating dinner.

I called Chris to come from across the street and told him that we’d get a cab to come soon. And in less than 10 minutes, a new guy I don’t recognize came back on a scooter and asked me if I’m the one who needs the cab. I was so confused at this point because this guy wasn’t the same man who originally went to look for a cab for us. And finally, a cab drove up to the front of the restaurant, and we got into his car. He pulled down his window and spoke a bit to the original guy who asked his friend to look for a cab for us. I thanked the restaurant worker and we drive off.

And even this cab driver was also so kind and considerate. We told him he wanted to go to a certain night market. He knew what it was, but he asked me if I checked the opening days, as it might be one of the off days. I said we were sure it would be open, but he said many stalls may be closed, and not many people would be there. In the end, he was right: many stalls were closed and it was practically just us there wandering through the aisles. But it was a fun experience to be stranded and try to get help from the locals. They were so quick to volunteer different ways to help us and strategized amongst themselves to see who knew who, and a few times reassured me that I’d get home safely. Taiwanese people are the best.

My cousin’s wife is originally from Kaohsiung, so naturally, she has a preference for Kaohsiung over Taipei. Kaohsiung is the far less traveled to city in Taiwan, down south, known for its seafood, even warmer and more tropical climate, as well as being the major port of Taiwan. In travel forums I’ve read, there seems to be a rivalry between the two cities that mirrors that of Sydney vs. Melbourne or LA vs. San Francisco. It seems a bit silly, but I suppose all of us are a little competitive.

After visiting for over a day now, to me Kaohsiung looks like a more modern and shiny version of Taipei. Taipei isn’t crowded at all by world standards, but Kaohsiung seems to have even less car and foot traffic. The buildings look newer and glittering. But the people seem to speak a lot more Taiwanese than Mandarin from what I’ve been hearing. As we’ve traveled further south, there is far less English known by people, and like I had read, so many older people don’t know or understand the romanization of the Chinese language because that really has not happened in Taiwan until fairly recently, so showing an English address or even saying an English word beyond the basic “hello” or “thank you” completely goes over their heads. Even some of the cab or Uber drivers we’ve met might initially address me in Mandarin, but gradually drift into Taiwanese, and only based on context and the very tiny similarities in the two languages can I make out what they are saying to me. Even when I respond in Mandarin, they still respond back in Taiwanese. I guess this is how one becomes fluent in multiple dialects of Chinese, simply by constantly listening and trying to adapt based on context.

I love both cities now, having visited both. There are far more “tourist” sites in Taipei, but Kaohsiung has its own charm and beauty. The public art here is also so fun and innovative. It doesn’t seem to matter where you go here — people are always friendly and helpful, and the food is delicious everywhere.

I still remember the very first time I had bubble tea — or tapioca tea, or pearl milk tea, or tapioca, or boba — whatever the heck you want to call it, I had it when I was 12 years old, in seventh grade at the Sweet House on Balboa in the mid-30s avenues in the Richmond district in San Francisco. I was working on a long-term science project with two of my friends, one of whom lived in the area. On the short walk from school to her house, she suggested we get tapioca drinks.

“What’s that?” I asked, confused.

“You’re going to love it – it’s so good!” she said. “It’s even addictive!”

So I got the one she recommended — the strawberry tapioca, and the worker behind the counter blended up a fresh, frothy strawberry drink for me and added these large, black tapioca balls to my drink. She stuck a huge straw into my drink and handed it over to me. I tasted it and chewed on the balls, and it was all over.

That began my love for bubble tea.

After a while, I stopped getting the smoothie-like fruit drinks and opted for the milk teas. On days when I wanted to be more indulgent, I’d get the taro or almond milk teas. Occasionally when the option existed, I’d mix in other jellies or puddings with the tapioca balls. The best taro milk teas were the drinks that had fresh blended taro root, which was hard to find. More and more places were using powder mixes as opposed to real tea to cut costs (and quality inevitably), so getting bubble tea was increasingly more annoying because it was hard to know the good places from the bad and cheap ones.

While researching our Taiwan trip, I came across an article talking about the supposed birth place of bubble tea — the teahouse Chun Shui Tang (literally meaning “spring water hall or court”) in Taichung, which was on our itinerary as a home base point to visit Sun Moon Lake.

The founder of Chun Shui Tang originally came up with the idea of serving Chinese tea cold in the early 1980s after visiting Japan, where he saw coffee served cold. Then, in 1988, his product development manager was sitting in a meeting when she randomly decided to pour her tapioca from her dessert into her Assam iced tea and drank it. Each person in the meeting had it and raved about it. And then it became a regular staple item that quickly grew up in popularity. To this day, it still makes up 80 to 90 percent of all Chun Shui Tang’s sales across all locations in Taiwan.

I had no idea about that history until this year, nor did I know the history of Assam tea and how it came from India to Taiwan. Apparently in a certain region of Taiwan, the climate and soil mimic that of India’s climate, so Assam tea is quite popular here and widely grown, and hence how it became combined with bubble tea. At pearl milk tea storefronts in Taichung and Sun Moon Lake, I read the signs in Chinese that gave so many options for what type of tea you’d like for your pearl milk tea, to then be mixed into fresh milk (they get that people are wary of powder mixes, as well). The options were so extensive, everything from Assam, pouchong, dong ding oolong, tie guan yin oolong, to just basic jasmine green.

And when we went to the original Chun Shui Tang (twice actually, because the first time I nearly had a melt down when we came 10 minutes after they were supposed to open, and the gate was closed and the sign said they were doing work inside. Someone must have heard my wailing because a worker came out to tell me that the work was temporary and they’d be open in just three hours. Thank God), we ordered a mango coconut smoothie with pearls, plus a standard Assam black milk tea with pearls. They took quite a while to make both, which was a clear sign that these were being brewed and made from scratch. And when they finally came, it was like heaven in a very tall and large glass: frothy and bubbly on the top with a luxurious and smooth mouthfeel. The tea was perfectly sweetened, not too much, and the richness of the milk was a great complement. Not only that, but the pearls themselves were much smaller than the ones we’re used to back home in the U.S. Chris found these to be better since they were less starchy, and thus he’d get full less quickly. The mango coconut smoothie wasn’t too thin or thick, and the coconut was just enough to not overwhelm the mango. Chris, who used to be a bubble tea skeptic, has gradually over time warmed up to it, and admitted this place was very, very good and worth coming to.

I don’t think my bubble tea adventures could have been any better or fuller than this. And to add to the greatness, they even gave me 15% off our order since we came on a weekday, even though I told them I was going to sit in, and the discount is usually for takeout orders. I love Taiwanese hospitality and kindness (and ingenuity with the bubble tea!).

Much to Chris’s initial disgust, we took a cheap but very timely and clean bus from Taichung to Sun Moon Lake this morning. What I didn’t realize about these buses is that they are not necessarily public transportation buses, but have specific destinations that people go to, such as the local university, an aboriginal Taiwanese village, and Sun Moon Lake. So the trip to get there was quite efficient and far shorter than the quoted time. The lake was quite spectacular and had a bright blue color in a similar shade to what we saw in the south island of New Zealand and Banff. It kind of looks fake, but you obviously know it’s real.

One highlight of the day was when we were walking to lunch, and I found a tea shop that didn’t have all those annoying hawkers yelling at us. So I poked in to look at what the offerings and prices were like. A friendly worker approached me and asked if I’d like to do a tasting, and so I agreed. She ushered me to their small seating area and had the two of us sit down. A much younger worker who couldn’t have been older than 25 came out and started the tea preparation. This was not a ready setup where the tea was already prepared in hot vats; she was literally starting from the beginning, brewing tea the old fashioned and traditional way by first pouring hot water onto the tea leaves in a traditional baowan, pouring out the first water, then pouring water a second time, steeping, then pouring, then steeping again for a richer flavor. She’d initially pour the tea into small, tall cups, then pour them into shorter, rounder cups, have us smell the fragrance of the tea in the original tall cups, then sip the tea from the shorter cups. It was so intensive and thorough, and the way she was describing the teas and the methods made it obvious that she’d studied tea for a while. She poured us four different teas, each time following the same traditional method and describing the methods, flavors, and intensities for us. And she even told us the cold brewing methods (and warned me to never, ever cold brew an oolong, which I was dumb enough to try a few months ago and realized how revolting it ended up being). This is probably the most thorough tea tasting I’ve ever experienced, all in a simple little shop on a random street in Sun Moon Lake.

I asked her how she got into the tea business, and she told me that it was a family business started by her paternal grandfather. She and her siblings were expected to continue the business, and she works long and hard, never having more than two to three days of rest. She doesn’t get much money doing this, so she doesn’t have enough money to travel abroad. That’s her future, though — running this tea shop to continue the family name and business. It was clear she didn’t really want that path, though, and felt locked into it. When she has traveled, she’s stayed within the country but loves the east coast the most (seems to be a reoccurring theme). I told her I thought the Sun Moon Lake area was beautiful and so much fun, and she laughed and said she was born and raised here, and after a while, the beauty gets boring and you just want something else. Once upon a time, there was no internet, no smart phones, so it was especially boring and isolating, she said. Now, it’s a bit more interesting with smart phones because you can learn new things and see other parts of the world that way, but it’s also sad because it exposes you to what is not tangible to you, whether it’s due to distance, time, or money.

“I’d love to go to America,” she said after I told her that’s where we were traveling from, “but I have no money and not enough days to go.” She also didn’t speak any English and said she didn’t understand anything I was saying to Chris, but figured I was just translating what she was saying.

The conversation made me feel a little sad. It’s not as though I’m unaware that these situations exist where people feel trapped, whether it’s due to political situations, family ties, or lack of money, but hearing it first hand from someone who is clearly looking right at me and amazed that I’ve come so far just to visit her little town at this lake she finds boring just made me feel a little guilty of my privilege. As much as it infuriates and embarrasses me that so many Americans pride themselves on speaking English and only English, I am fully cognizant of how important a language it is, and how learning it and mastering it could completely change a person’s life and future in today’s world. Putting aside financial or birthplace reasons, I’m privileged just because of the fact that I speak English. English can set you free, and could potentially set this girl free if she knew it because it would open doors of opportunity for her.

Before leaving for our late afternoon train to Taichung, we spent the day exploring more of Taipei. When people said that Taiwan would be sickly hot and humid in the summer, they were not joking or exaggerating. I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for a shower in the evening than the days we’ve spent here. Every day, my face has felt like an oil spill, and you could probably stick paper all over my body and have them stay still all day, too.

While at Huashan 1914 Creative Park, we noticed a very long queue for some little tent. We found out that the tent was housing a temporary Sailor Moon pop-up store. Chris thought this was especially funny – “Asians,” he muttered. Then, to make the situation even funnier, right behind the Sailor Moon tent was a truck set up for free Jim Beam cocktails – whiskey cocktails, ALCOHOL – and there was NO line at all! I was confused for a second and figured it was free, but I asked just to be sure. The man standing at the truck said it was a promotion and confirmed that all the drinks were free. So of course we took two and laughed over the fact that everyone wanted to wait in line to buy Sailor Moon products, but not a single person other than the two of us wanted to grab a free whiskey cocktail. The juxtaposition of these two situations just showed the values of the Taiwanese people right there. We clearly value alcohol over Sailor Moon.

We really lucked out today. A lot of visitors who come to see Taroko Gorge on the East Coast of Taiwan oftentimes encounter rain and low visibility, but for us for almost the entire day, it was blue skies and a few clouds. We hired a private guide-driver to take us around, and she seemed really excited to learn that I could speak some Chinese. She chattered away with me about everything from living in the U.S. to race relations to exercise, and she told us that the East Coast of Taiwan, mostly overlooked by foreign visitors, is the favorite place for most Taiwanese when they want to travel in their own country. It’s not hard to see why: the beauty of the mountains, cliffs, and the stunning Pacific Ocean are there. Further to the southeast of Taiwan are the islands and the beaches where Taiwanese people often go for holidays for swimming, snorkeling, and scuba diving. Given that it is lesser touched, I’d imagine it would be extremely pristine there. The Qingshui Cliffs, or “clear water” cliffs, was one of my favorite spots that we visited today.

One thing I hadn’t thought about much when visiting Taiwan was the butterfly life here. I thought about the animals and the exotic fruit, but was stunned to see so many gorgeous butterflies everywhere, ranging in size and colors. Taiwan is known as one of the butterfly kingdoms in the world. These huge black butterflies with red-tinged tips were so big that Chris initially thought they were birds. The ones I loved the most were about three inches in wing-span, outlined in black, with a nearly florescent pale blue and purple color. There were also swallowtail butterflies that I’d never seen before but had identified in a butterfly book long ago, a combination of black outlines, pale yellow, red, and blue. I don’t think they are indigenous to this area, but they made it here somehow. Almost all the butterflies were multicolor and fluttering around in groups. It was almost surreal.

Today was our first full day in Taipei. It wasn’t exactly as how I imagined it. The buildings aren’t as tall as I thought (they look especially small of course when standing around Taipei 101), and it’s really nowhere as crowded as the streets of Tokyo and Seoul were. I guess it’s an unfair comparison given the population sizes of both Tokyo and Seoul are massive next to Taipei, which sits on the little island of Taiwan.

One thing I did expect, though, was the friendliness and willingness to help from the Taiwanese. Twice, when we were looking at maps or waiting for a car, people offered to help. A couple times in an Uber, the drivers made small talk and gave helpful suggestions about where we were going. For the electronics plaza, the driver told us that the two buildings were connected on a higher floor, so there would be no need to exit the building to enter the other, and that the building he’d drop us off at would be a better starting point. At Shilin night market, the driver pointed out where the food was vs. the shopping vs. the games, and also told us that there was more food in the basement level. I never actually asked any questions, but they volunteered all this information to me. I’ve never had that experience anywhere before, whether it’s been in the U.S. on work travel or abroad. I’m sure it’s partly because I can speak the language here, but the proactivity was so kind and thoughtful.

That’s the other thing. I only know basic Mandarin Chinese after studying 3.5 years in college, and because I don’t speak it every day, it took some time to adjust to listen properly and understand what people were saying to me. What has been fun about this trip so far is that as I’m listening to more (and eavesdropping on other people’s conversations so I can remember vocabulary again), I’m realizing even more so that it just takes changing the environment to understand the language better and speak better. I still get annoyed with myself when I can’t always understand what should be a simple question or response (e.g. “are you traveling anywhere other than Taipei?”), but it is what it is, and many basic things will get lost based on accents and speed of speech. It’s actually been a little thrilling when I hear something, think for a few seconds, and recognize what people are saying. Given that the last time I took a Chinese class was in 2007, I think I’m doing fairly well so far.

We arrived in Taipei this evening after a layover in Tokyo, and since Chris has status at this hotel chain, they offered us a number of welcome refreshments and treats and had them sent to our room. One of them was literally called in English and in Chinese a “salty snack.” I had no idea how to interpret that, and I figured it must just be a bowl of rice crackers or something quick and, well, snack-like. The front desk attendant said she would call the kitchen immediately to place our order since they’d be closing soon. I thought to myself… why would they need to call the kitchen for a snack? What I was not prepared for was when room service came to the room and presented a plate of hot braised five-spiced beef, tendon, and cow stomach. This is what they are giving to us as a “snack” before bedtime?!