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Weather Report: Taipei

Taipei has been dreary. Grey skies, light rain, flippy winds. All much colder than I remembered. Aren’t I supposed to come here to escape winter? Instead I find myself wearing all my layers, including my New York leg thermals, simply to stay warm. And when I’m at home, curled up reading or watching NBA, I’m under two blankets and too afraid to move outside the comfort zone. Why don’t Taiwan apartments have heat? No need, it’s a semi-tropical place! Psssh, yeah right. Bali sunshine couldn’t come fast enough...

Before leaving, I had a semi-disaster as I stupidly locked myself out of my phone. Did you know that if you unsuccessfully attempt to unlock your iPhone ten times it goes into shutdown mode? While my fingers were still damp, I tried to access it to Shazam a song (never got it) and summarily took it from “oh forgot my passcode” to “panic, it’s gonna have to be wiped!”

So my last day in Taipei was spent running from Apple Store to semi-fake Apple store, eventually paying $10 and spending two hours using their wifi to re-download all my apps. The good news is that the phone came back to life, the bad news is that I had to back it up from last September. I tried to think about what I might have missed in all that time, but the sad true was: nothing much.

With six weeks of travel ahead of me, I tried whittle down all my possessions to the bare minimum, arriving finally at the truth that my recently field tested Cotopaxi Allpa and trusty black duffel didn't actually carry that much.

A week’s worth of socks, clothing, and underwear, plus one jacket and three pant type items, didn’t take up much room. But a mini-hair dryer, bottles of hair items, and eye stuff, those were the space suckers. My dreams of bringing along extra shoes or a travel podcast mic were laughably naive. (Also, I didn’t bring any travel laundry pods, or the Hair Story not-shampoo shampoo stuff.) A friend gifted me a lovely quick dry travel towel and I can already tell it'll be a versatile accompaniment. Aside from that, I was prepared with a few plug converters, four external batteries, many wires, Kindle, my laptop, iPad, and always always the UE Mini Boom.

My most exciting item to test out was a backpack from L.L. Bean that folds up into the size of a large chip bag! I didn’t even know this type of thing existed and diving into the world of lightweight, but useful, travel gear has been a delight. I consulted Wirecutter’s travel guide for stuff but mostly fended off my impulse to buy everything.

A word about packing cubes: I saw my cousin use them a few months ago and with her recommendation decided I needed to try some for myself. I bought Eagle Creek’s Specter Tech because they were reviewed as the lightest option. While the size ranges turned out to be confusingly small, having dedicated cubes to put stuff in has already paid dividends. So long plastic bags, hello reusable travel cubes!

Yeah, I’m ready to leave.

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