Day 307: i'm going to taiwan

oh boy i decided to melatonin again and it’s hitting hard and wow i can barely keep my eyes open

first off, what a day. there’s still a ton of problems with politics and it’s not like we’ve eradicated the problem of money influencing policies for corporate interests, but i’m sure as heck looking forward to having a president who doesn’t lie so much that it makes you feel like you’re taking crazy pills. can’t wait until we can look back on all this in several months and be like “hey remember when donald trump was president lmao”

anyway, i bought my flight to taiwan!!!! i’m not sure what i’ve been waiting for, but i figured no date is going to feel perfect so i chose two weeks from today. the hardest part about this was actually booking a place to stay because taiwan requires you to stay in a government-sanctioned hotel during your 15-day quarantine period but a bunch of them area already booked up for quite a while.

the cheapest one that i was able to find is 2200 TWD a night which is $77 a night. that feels ridiculously expensive since i’m used to staying in hostels for less than $20 a night, but i don’t really have a choice if i want to go. maybe having to drop over a grand just to get past the quarantine period will motivate me to make money from my projects instead of telling myself i will and just hermit coding instead.

since you can’t leave your hotel room at all, hotels offer meal service for a bit extra (mine was 600 TWD / $21 USD a day for four meals) but i figured their vegan options are either nonexistent or not great so i declined it and i’m gonna go all-in on huel. did you know huels has meals in whole foods form now?! we’ve come full circle. that stuff has a shelf life of an entire year which is freaking crazy. i’m excited to try it out when i’m stuck inside my windowless room in taiwan though! really praying that they’ve fixed the mysterious cause behind deadly huel farts that my friend warned me about when he first introduced me to huel because otherwise i’m not going to make it out of that windowless room alive

now that i only have 14 days before i leave, i gotta step it up in my house-fixing mission. i’ve made much less progress than i’d hoped to at this point because, well, coding is way more fun than scrubbing toilets and debugging fridges, but i want to fix some of the major issues before i go

oh boy, i’m excited!!!! it’s been so long since i’ve traveled and i can’t wait to be in a real city again but this time without coronavirus

extremely-not-fun-fact: remember when i said that the US crossed 100,000 daily cases for the first time several days ago? now it’s at 130,000+ and it’s going to get worse given we’re just entering winter. stay safe, friends