after the departure in vienna we had a stop in bangkok. since there were not that many cool movies available during the flight, we only watched "The Pirates! Band of Misfits", "battleship", "the lady", and "tofu boy" - a strange chinese animation movie, we had the chance to sleep quite a bit. in bangkok we had a short stop of about an hour, then we flew on to taiwan, taipeh airport. in taiwan all the people are super friendly. and quite trusting. there was an asian woman at the airport trying to get some money from the ATM there. since we also needed some taiwanese dollars from the machine, we queued right behind the lady. then she turned around with a helpless look on her face and told us the machine wont give her money. so we moved closer and looked at the available options. once we've chosen one, she was asked to enter her PIN. without hesitation she punched in her code, while we were standing right next to her. of course we looked at the nice and lovely ceiling while she was hitting the keys. puh... strange woman. ahm... when we tried, the ATM also refused to give us money. it's seems they don't have maestro here. but since ninsti was already here in 2009, she still had quite a lot of dollars left which we now spent for a bus ride to taipeh main station. but before we had to fight the immense humidity. the temperature was ok, but combined with the humidity it was pretty tough. but... once on the bus we enjoyed the air conditioner. a lot of new highways are currently built, but they all are several metres above the ground level. sometimes even in layers. the best we saw were three roads yet to be finished in three levels. we assumed it would be because of the floods, tsunamis, and typhoons. speaking of... we didn't see any damage or such. so far. we also found a neat little hostel right close to main station. it's called "happy family hostel II". oh what a lovely name. and they have air conditioner - yippieh! after checking in we took a stroll around the area. to me it's a wonderful mixture of my asia trips so far. a little bit of japan (the cuteness in all the things you can buy), and a little bit of hongkong (the run down buildings, weird cabling, etc.). ah, apropos cuteness... they love hello kitty here. "eva", the airline we booked, has hello kitty all over in their catalogues. and they even have an boeing painted in pink with hello kitty all over it. totally awesome! to finish this day, we took some sushi from a sushi take away restaurant, as all the other restaurants and street food has already closed. so far, we really like it here! track: day 01