Taipei in 2 Days: A Sunset Hill Instead of Taipei 101
Taipei is where I finally bought a new DJI controller — I'd drowned the old one a few days before leaving home, and it took almost two weeks of our month-long Asia trip to replace it. Taiwan became my 83rd country: 2 nights, one day with a local friend, and a sunset from a hill instead of the top of Taipei 101. I found Taipei really nice, and my girlfriend liked it even more. If you travel on a Ukrainian passport, the visa section near the end is worth reading before you book anything.
Taiwan is an island of about 23 million people across the Taiwan Strait from mainland China. Its best-known building, Taipei 101, is 508 meters tall and was the world's tallest from 2004 until Burj Khalifa opened in 2010. Fun fact: Taiwanese garbage trucks play music so residents know when to bring their trash out — classics like Beethoven's "Für Elise" and "A Maiden's Prayer" by Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska, a Polish composer whose piece was first published in Warsaw in 1856. I didn't expect a Warsaw connection in Taipei's waste management :)
We flew in from Bangkok on an early AirAsia flight, a day after our overland detour to Vientiane, Laos, and landed at Taoyuan International Airport around noon.
Is Taipei worth visiting?
Taipei doesn't have one look. Older buildings stand next to new ones, the architecture isn't uniform, and every district feels different from the one before. Some parts felt cold to me — not temperature-wise, the city itself felt like a box. Then we got to the center, where we were staying, and Taipei turned bright, modern and neat.
Compared to Bangkok, where we'd been the night before, Taipei is cleaner, at least at street level, and feels a bit more technological. Everyone we dealt with was friendly.
So, is Taipei worth visiting? For 2 days — yes. Would I fly across the world just for Taipei? I'm not sure, but 2 days is a small sample, and I might be underrating it.
AI customer service on the Taipei Metro
The most futuristic thing I saw in Taipei was a QR code on a train wall. Scan it, and you're talking to the Taipei Metro's AI customer service. According to Taipei Metro itself, it launched in November 2022, the QR codes sit in stations and train cars, and by mid-2024 it was used over 100,000 times a month. When a passenger reports a problem through it, an alert chime goes off in the customer service and traffic control centers, and staff send the right people to deal with it.
A Taipei sunset viewpoint instead of Taipei 101
Our first day belonged to a local friend, who showed us a big part of the city and took us to local restaurants — first stop was Xiangti Avenue Plaza, where we had Taiwanese dumplings and soup that first evening.
The obvious evening move in Taipei is the Taipei 101 observatory. We skipped it: we'd just been up on the rotating deck of Baiyoke Sky in Bangkok, and we were a little tired of going up a tower in every city. Instead, our friend took us to Fuzhoushan Park (福州山公園), a small hill park with a lookout over the city. We took a taxi up, and watched the sunset over Taipei from there.
The drone stayed in the bag. The hill was in a no-fly zone, which I'd expected: Taipei has an airport right inside the city, Songshan, and the Taipei City Government's drone page rules out airport restricted zones and national parks — Yangmingshan National Park covers the hills on the city's northern edge. If you bring a drone to Taiwan, check the Civil Aviation Administration's airspace map first. We took pictures on our phones instead, and they came out nice.
Finally, a new DJI controller
A few days before flying out of Warsaw, I drowned my DJI controller — the same week my phone went for a swim too. There was no time to replace it before departure. Taiwan is known for electronics (it's the home of TSMC, after all), so buying the replacement in Taipei, almost halfway through the trip, felt logical. I found a DJI store around Xiangti Avenue Plaza and paid about $90 for a new one.
The stores there run an on-the-spot VAT refund desk on the top floor, worth roughly 5% back. I skipped it — the queue wasn't worth the time for that much.
Day 2: Taipei's old district by the water
On day 2 we went to Dadaocheng, one of Taipei's older, historic districts, along Dihua Street by the Tamsui River: some shopping, a slow walk along a water channel, a few more shops. Then we headed to the airport for our 18:10 flight to Seoul.
Taiwan visa for Ukrainians
At the time of writing, Taiwan isn't visa-free for Ukrainian passport holders, and Ukraine isn't on Taiwan's eVisa eligibility list either, so you need a regular visitor visa from a Taiwanese mission. Since February 2022, Ukraine-related affairs have been handled by the Taipei Representative Office in Poland in Warsaw. Its tourist visa page asks non-Schengen citizens for a valid Polish residence card, so it works if you live in Poland, like me. The rest of the list: a bank statement, a travel itinerary, a return ticket, a hotel booking or invitation letter, and the consular fee. Standard processing is 7 calendar days, and applications aren't accepted earlier than a month before the trip. Ours cost 180 PLN per person and took about a week, as advertised; there's a paid express option too, but we didn't need it. We applied in Warsaw in person and got the visa as a sticker in the passport — one of two trips we made from Kraków to embassies before this trip even started.
Practical Notes
- Fill in the free online Taiwan Arrival Card before landing — it replaced the paper card in October 2025.
- From Taoyuan Airport, the Airport MRT express reaches Taipei Main Station in about 35–40 minutes; the listed fare is NT$160.
- Drones: check every spot on the CAA airspace map before you unpack. Our sunset hill was a no-fly zone.
- Taiwan uses Type A/B sockets at 110 V. European plugs need an adapter; most phone and laptop chargers handle 110–240 V.
- An Airalo eSIM worked fine for us in Taiwan (not sponsored).
- Our hotel near the center, with a spa bath in the room, was NT$5,103 for 2 nights — about $80 a night.
2 days, one of them mostly shopping, isn't much to judge a city by, so take my "box" impression with a grain of salt. From Taipei we flew to Seoul, where, after all my complaints about towers, we went up the tallest building in the country anyway :)