First flight, Taipei and arrival in Auckland (29.09. - 01.10.16)

First of all, the flight was terrible. And if I didn't have to go back, I would probably never voluntarily fly for such a long time again. The seats were uncomfortable, it was incredibly loud and sleeping was almost impossible. It's probably like this on every flight, but it was the first one of my life, so I was quite nervous overall. And I was told that we were lucky with the takeoff and landing, but I still found it terrible. But the worst part was the food. Unfortunately, it wasn't just bad on the plane, but Taipei didn't meet my taste at all.

What we saw of the city during our two-hour city tour was beautiful, and the temple from my view was even breathtaking. However, there was a musty, sweet smell throughout the city, sometimes mixed with facets of MSG and a fishy aroma, which convinced me never to visit this city again and to remove Chinese food from my menu for now. Especially bad was a small market in a poorer neighborhood in Taipei, where, among other things, you could buy chicken feet. The most disgusting culinary experience I had was in a candy factory. There we were forced to try slime covered in cocoa, which made me gag. It would be an insult to all sweets to call that slime candy, it was just disgusting.

But luckily everything went very well afterwards. Even though I was not very pleased with the food in Taipei, the city left a very positive impression on me. I was still happy to finally arrive in Auckland after a total of about 26 hours of flying. David, our room landlord (we booked through AirBnB), picked us up along with his German girlfriend. We were very happy to see them at the airport, even though we arrived there two hours late. We were even happier about the extremely delicious french fries that David bought for us, although it needs to be said that anything that didn't taste Chinese would probably have seemed delicious to us. After talking a bit with the two of them and taking a long shower, we fell completely exhausted into our bed (to our great joy we found out the next morning that it was a box spring bed) and fell asleep immediately.

Jasmin