Ni Hao, Taiwan Embraces Us...

So finally after a 2.5 hour flight, we finally landed at Taipei's Taoyuan International Airport. And our wish to visit Taiwan was finally coming true. We had tried to visit Taiwan alongwith our China Trip in 2013, but we could not make it due to the paucity of time. And earlier in April this year I barely scratched the surface, when I touched down at Taoyuan for just about an hour, which was barely enough to do some Plane Spotting and pick up a pack of Taiwanese oolong tea at the Everrich Duty-Free from within the transit area.

And today Taiwan was not only embracing the world, but also us...

As we headed towards the immigration counter, we saw this counter with immigration forms, and, yes, you won't believe it - spectacles in case you forgot yours at home! These spectacles may not be specifically of the dioptres prescribed for you, but using them you will be able to just about fill out the form. This is another example of the jugaad that I have seen all throughout the Orient! Perhaps innovativeness is a very Asian thing...

And this was the long immigration queue I had ever seen, 4 parallel lines of hundreds of crazed tourists like us waiting to get our passports stamped...

The wait seemed endless and 2AM and waiting was the last thing we wanted to do. We needed a warm bed to snooze off for a couple of hours...

The guy right ahead of us on the line looked a lot like the Japanese character, Taka, in the 2014 Bollywood hit, Queen!

The queue had quite a few Koreans, Japanese, Hong Kongers and Chinese. Since the thawing of relations across the straits there has been an explosion of air traffic between the two estranged nations...

And finally we reached the immigration counter at about 2.30 AM, after a wait of nearly one and a quarter hour in the queue. The immigration officer scanned our online travel authorizations and then our passports - she spent a good 5-7 minutes on our Schengen visas examining them with a magnifying glass. She was probably verifying the "genuineness" of our Schengen visas. She satisfied herself and stamped our passports!
Wow! We were "officially" in Taiwan, the Republic of China! 

We collected our bags, exchanged money and proceeded to the arrivals area to find Alpha, our AirBnB host waiting for us! We felt sorry that he had been waiting for us for over 2 hours but were delighted when he gave us a warm welcome!

Thanks for embracing us on our first visit to Taiwan!