Taipei, arrival and first impressions

Here is my first post about Taiwan!

I had a funny situation on my flight to Taipei: Right after entering the plane, when I wanted to take out my Kindle ebook reader out of the pocket in front of me, I found a Tablet computer there. Obviously someone forgot it there, so I called the stewardess to hand it to her, so that she could give it to someone at the airport before we left for Taipei. However the stewardess reacted rather confused to my inquiry. It turned out that there was also a tablet at the seat next to me .. and at the seat next to that... good job, Lino!^^

Before describing my first impressions, I feel that I should start with some history that might make it easier to understand Taiwanese culture.
I feel a bit embarrassed about it, but I have to admit that the first time I actively remember hearing of Taiwan was at UCSD when I met Iris and she said that she's from Taiwan. A bit later that day I googled "Taiwan" to overcome my worst ignorance and found it to be a small island at Chinas coast that basically has a Chinese cultural background but became politically independent from Mainland China after a civil war around 1949. In short: During the civil war, the Communists with Mao won and obtained mainland China and the Nationalists, called Kuomintang, lost and from all over China had to retreat to the island of Taiwan.
As a result of this, Taiwan has cultural influences from many Chinese regions all over China and is very culturally diverse. Secondly because it used to be a Japanese colony before, there has been some Japanese cultural influences as well. Therefore Taiwan is culturally extremely diverse.
By now Taiwan is a proper and economically developed democracy. However relations with China are still somewhat unclear and even though the situation is relatively relaxed nowadays it is still quite complicated in tems of diplomatic issues. Whats I found particularly interesting is that Taiwan officially wanted to reconquer mainland China until 1992!

very ambitious if you look at the proportions... :D

All in all the history is quite interesting, so if you want to learn more, read this!

Now to my first impressions:
I think I can say that my arrival could not have been any better: Iris (Taiwanese friend from UCSD) picked me up at the airport and when we arrived at the universities dorms, in the lobby my friends Tanja (Tientien) and Sascha (Jiaxiasha or something) that I got to know in my Chinese class in Berlin were waiting for me. With lots of help from Iris I quickly finished the paperwork and we got to my room which was quite nice - better and bigger than I had expected.
Shortly after, together we went to a nearby Japanese restaurant where we enjoyed delicous ramen and later some frozen yoghurt with lots of tasty toppings as desert.

Iris

first dinner in Taiwan with Tanja, Sascha and Iris

In the next days I had to organize lots of stuff and buy things for my room, which is quite neat by now. Things here tend to be quite cheap - I got an office chair for 35€ and a new bike for 60€.
Here you see the different stages ;-)

Stage 1: Chaos

Stage 2: Organisation

Stage 3: Finetuning

and here the other side

What I also like, is that my room is in the 13th floor, nearly on top of the building with a nice view :-)
One afternoon, Tanja and me checked out the accessible roof of our dorms building ... and got locked out! WTF?
Finally we had to call for help down from the roof until someone from the reception came up and helped us to get out. It was not our fault though - the door had a technical problem :-/

view from the rooftop - in the back you can see the Taipei 101 tower

During the last days, together with Sascha and Tanja, we also explored some more sights of Taipei and ate lots of good foooood! And yesterday night my friend Karl from Berlin also arrived here. His room is only two doors to the right - very convenient!
Here some impressions of Taipei:

in a temple

you can see the Taipei 101 from everywhere - its massively huge!

huge nightmarket - pretty neat!

this was a massage where we were beaten with sticks - and we had to pay for that!

From the first moment here, I felt that choosing the National Taiwan University has been the right decision. The people seem very friendly and open, the food is very diverse, delicious and cheap, my new university seems to be excellent and the whole city feels very vibrant, stimulating and likeable! I can't wait to explore more of Taipei and all the other parts of Taiwan in the next months.
Maybe I would even say that from all the Asian cities I've seen during the last months, Taipei is my favourite!