So the other day my brother asked whether I wanted a Nintendo Switch for my upcoming birthday, and I said I didn’t really need it and probably wouldn’t play much with it. So he asked if instead, I’d like a new computer, specifically, if I wanted the new Macbook Air, I said sure, it’s cute and light, and it also matches my pink watch. I know those aren’t precisely the right reasons to buy a new computer, but they seemed good enough to me at that point.
I had been procrastinating buying the computer for some reason, maybe because I felt I couldn’t justify purchasing a new computer when I didn’t really make huge use of the one I already had. The point is I took so long in making up my mind that by the time I finally went to Costco to buy it, they were all gone. This resulted in my purchase date being pushed a week.
On the day, when I finally decided to go to a different store and get the computer, my friend came with me and we went to Taoyuan where the shopping malls have apple resellers (there aren’t any actual Apple stores in this city). It was a busy day, as we all had the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday in Taiwan, so finding a parking spot proved hard to do, we finally settled on parking on a sidewalk alongside a bunch of other scooters and went on our way to the mall.
At the first mall, we went to a store, and it was so full nobody really paid us any attention, so we just looked around and left. I had been wanting candles for the longest time, so we went to the bookstore in the basement and proceeded to take our sweet time smelling a bunch of different candles, till we finally manage to choose the best ones. After that, we went to have lunch at a Japanese curry place and then proceeded to try the initial store once more, but to no avail. So we settled on visiting a different shopping mall, with another apple reseller shop. At that store, it was as simple as walking up to a sales clerk and letting her know that I wanted to buy a pink computer. She quickly went to get a new one out of storage brought it to the register and charged me for it. Then they helped me set it up and had me check it for any faults. It was okay, as any new computer ought to be. So I was finally the proud owner of a rose gold laptop. We left the store and started discussing how I wanted to go home to drop off the computer before meeting up with our other friend who was coming from Taipei that evening.
It was a great surprise to find out that the scooter was no longer on the sidewalk, in fact, there were no scooters at all. All that remained were the plate numbers written on the floor. The scooter had been towed and though I had been to the place where the police take towed vehicles before, I didn’t feel confident enough to tell the address to a cab driver. So we found a police officer and asked him to share the address with us, he did, and according to my friend’s phone it was only a ten-minute walk away, so we decided to walk there. I told her the place had been far away the last time I had been there but her phone said otherwise. We walked and walked and when we got to the place the google maps said, there was nothing there. So she asked a guard about the address and he said that we still had a long way to go, which meant we shouldn’t have been walking at all. We went to a bus stop and then took the bus to a station close to the place. We got off and started walking.
As we walked a Taiwanese man approached us and started asking us questions about where we were from and what we did in Taiwan. All the way up to the towing place, the conversation ended when asked for my line and said we were cute, I said no thank you and kept walking. Luckily he said okay and went away. My friend and I made it to the towing place, she paid the fine, we got on the scooter and we went drove all the way to Zhongli to meet our friend for dinner at the night market. It was a very exhausting day, to say the least, and I did it all in heels, which proved to be a challenge by the end of that night as my feet were in pain and had developed a couple of blisters. Life in Taiwan is so full of random adventures.
