Smart Asia Getaways
Discover Asia, the smart way
You can access the entirety of urban Taiwan without renting a car, bumming a ride, or setting foot in a cab, and for relatively cheap. The only potential obstacle is language. High Speed Rail connects Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and its southern hub, Kaohsiung – a distance greater than that between New York and Boston – in 90 minutes, for 50-70 US dollars as of the time of this writing. At either end you can walk off the high speed rail train and onto the local subway without leaving…
The good news is there are two Taipei hotels we can recommend unambiguously – the Formosa Regent in more-or-less the city center, and the Home Hotel in the far newer – and more automobile-scale taipei 101 neighborhood. (Reviews of both are bolded below, if you want to skip the song-and-dance.) The “mixed” news is good news for you, because you get to benefit from our mistakes, and bad news for us, because we had to make them, and basically amounts to the fact that you can’t trust a…
I’ll save you the suspense: skip the Temple Street Night Market. Sure – go to the neighborhood – the Jordan Street stop on the Red Line. For browsing, people, watching, and getting the “rhythm” of Kowloon, the neighborhood is worth a visit. It’s just that I wouldn’t go out of my way for the market itself, which consists of little more than hundreds-upon-hundreds of booths selling basically the same cheap sundries you can find at wallmart (probably literally the same, when you consider where they’re made), where they…
A trip to New York will keep a first-timer busy. Why? Try figuring out JFK to Brooklyn on your own without a cab. The designers of Hong Kong’s public transit system, by contrast, engineered most of the guesswork out. Below, I’ll tell you how a single card gets you from airport to hotel and back. It’s so easy and intuitive here that I could easily write “follow the signs and ask directions” and send you on your merry way. Still, I messed a couple of things up. Made…
If you’re perusing this article, it’s likely you googled a phrase like “real global entry wait time”, or “is global entry approval immediate after my interview.” Sure, the state department website lists the “official” responses to these FAQs, in a manner geared to buy them maximum response time, but like me you’re probably looking for a few “real world” case studies from people who have actually gone through the process. But let me begin with what this blog is about, and why you want Global Entry in the…
The most famous Taiwanese restaurant in the world came into being because its founder, a Chinese man named Yang Bingyi, couldn’t sell cooking oil. Let’s back up. Let’s talk about soup dumplings. Xiaolongbao (“shau long bow”), literally “small bamboo-steamed bun”, owes its origin to an unknown inventor in Nanxiang – a suburb of Shanghai – who sold the little buns at a food stand adjoining a park. It’s difficult to get a fix on the exact moment residents of Nanxiang “crossed over” from xiaolongbao-less antiquity to xiaolongbao-abundant modernity,…
I’m going to depart from the usual staid, scholarly, detached-sounding travel-writing-y style characteristic of most travel blogs and articles. Actually full stop. I was never really in that wheelhouse in the first place. Loyal readers of Smart Getaways for Couples (Mom, that means you) know what they’re getting into, and new readers of this spinoff blog (welcome!), especially those who found me through the Google, are about to find out. But lest anyone get the wrong idea, when I write about a travel destination, I’m first-and-foremost trying to…