Buses cover Taipei's streets like ants cover a picnic. There are buses to get you nearly anywhere in the main city and its outskirts. What's intimidating is that if you don't know where a bus goes, you could end up in a part of town you don't know and be far from home, at that. I know three fairly well: 235, 802, and 99. However, a few weeks ago a friend from work, Nicole, took myself and my co-workers out to Banciao and we took a bus I hadn't been on, the 37, going in a direction I hadn't traveled.
So when I found myself at Banciao MRT station by a major bus stop, I figured that instead of riding the MRT for one stop, getting off, and taking a bus the rest of the way home, I could try for one of the buses listed on the signs.
What made me nervous was that I could potentially take the bus in the wrong direction and have to stay on it for hours while it circled back to where I needed to go. However, I had my iPod Touch with me, and a handy app that lets me draw in Chinese characters. So I was able to look up the characters for the sounds "min" and "an" (the name of my street, Min'an) and "road." After establishing where Min'an Road was on the 37's route, I found the sign that indicated all buses going by it would be headed toward Xinzhuang, the town where I live.
I didn't have much more time to think, though, because the bus came and I hopped on.
And I got home perfectly fine.
The rest of the day was crap--I stayed up late last night and didn't sleep much, I was hungry all day because I couldn't think of anything I wanted to eat (ironic, right?), and the juicer I bought is proving to be rather bad at extracting juice. (At least it's a decent blender.) But I'm glad that I did, at least, manage to get on the right bus from a semi-strange part of town and get home without mishap. It's another small step in the process of getting used to how things work in Taiwan, finally having enough information to be able to make intuitive leaps.
Can't wait to see how much I know at the end of a year!
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