The Big Taiwan Update

I'm back in the states, barely recovered from jetlag and its now time for the big update! For organizational purposes, I'm going to go day by day:
Day one (12/27/06):
We left for the airport. Fortunately that morning I had an appointment with the dentist so my teeth were squeaky clean and ready for the 20 hour flight. The flight itself was pretty boring, I slept throught the first three movies, but I watched "The Island." The final verdict is that while Ewan Mcgregor is gorgeous, the movie was still only so-so. I had trouble getting comfortable since the seats were so small and the engine was so loud and the fact that all other noises just seemed muffled. We landed in the airport at 6:30am on 12/29. My ears oddly didn't have any problems with pressure. Mom's on the otherhand were so screwed up she was deaf for 3 hours. It was a little odd having to yell in her ears. We were whisked through baggage claim and customs and were picked up by a taxi my aunt called for us. One thing May and I forgot was how badly people drove in Taiwan. At one point, the taxi had to change lanes and he did so by literally driving onto the white line and literally forcing other cars out of the way. I looked out the window and the neighboring car was just a few inches away from the glass. It makes me fervently appreciate American roads and traffic laws.
Day two (12/29/06):
So my time thing is a little off, but when we traveled all the way across, we jumped really far ahead in time.
We got to my aunt's apartment and slept for a couple hours. We got up and then came some unpacking and figuring out her apartment on our own since she was in the US. She is an antique collector so her house has tons of them squished in (orderly fashion though, other than the fact that there needed to be a good extra foot of space between everything, the arrangement was quite lovely). It took us a bit of deliberating to figure out whether or not we could actually sit on the antique furniture. In the end we decided we could, and I actually spent most of my evenings sitting on an antique bench thingy than on the actual couch. Her apartment also had one of those moving door/wall panels that looks really cool, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what the point of it was. I suppose it just goes against my archie sensibilities. After mosying around the house a bit, we ventured out to explore. We went on South FuXing Rd and searched for a bank to exchange bills. None of the banks seem to want to take US currency anymore. Or at least, they wouldn't take specific serial numbers. Some wouldn't take travelers checks either - which, in my mind, defeats the purpose of having them. We walked a good 10 or so blocks to find a Bank of Taiwan which was supposedly the only bank that would take the abhorred US currency and when we got there after all the searching, they wouldn't take most of the bills either. It didn't help either that the weather was much hotter than we anticipated and we were sweating quite a bit despite the fact that there were Taiwanese citizens happily walking around in long winter trenchcoats. But then, 60 degrees is pretty cool by their standards.
(to be continued)