This morning the GF and I went to apply for a visa extension. It all took far longer than we had accounted for. First, a half hour walk to the visa office, passing through the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, possibly the only truly monumental building in the country. Then on to a restaurant for lunch, which turned out to be spectacular. This is a nondescript Sichuan vegetarian restaurant which turned out to have an incredible subtlety and nuance to every single dish we tried. We ordered poorly so all three were high in mala, but the character of each was entirely different. Quite sublime, especially from a place of which I didn’t have high expectations.
Next to a 7-11 to print out our supporting documents. This took ages, since the system is set up to print each document individually. A valuable lesson learned, as I told the GF: always compile into one first.
The the visa office where I was full of admiration for the temperature checking equipment and screens with ghostly figures of passersby, each tagged with their body temperature, when I suddenly remembered I had forgotten my passport. So the GF applied, and I will have to come back tomorrow. First we went for our photos, then we waited for his turn, he submitted his application and staggered back. Pleasant as Taiwanese officialdom tends to be, visas are always a stressful affair. Hopefully they’ll come through without trouble, though thankfully the Taiwanese government has also announced a 1 month extension to all visas thanks to this coronavirus business.
The Chiang Kai Shek Memorial is a very pleasant place to have just 10 minutes away, I must say, whatever one might think of the man himself. It is beautiful and imposing, and the gardens are really lovely, with walkways that make one feel one is walking through a forest, and others which are manicured Chinese gardens with little bridges over ponds.
We walked on to our new language school where we paid for the next few weeks of lessons. By not it was past 4 and it was our turn to make dinner. So, giving up entirely on the workday we went for coffee and apple pie before returning and I went to make dinner.