The World Tour of Oopsies—Chapter 21: The Machete & the Tiger’s Head

Nov.20.2025

[The World Tour of Oopsies is an ongoing series of travel stories about my first decade of travel. During these adventures and misadventures, I had to unlearn many things I thought I knew about life. Welcome to my miseducation.]

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Catch up on my World Tour of Oopsies:

Part I / Taiwan

Following my return from India during my sophomore year (see: Ch. 20), I spent the summer in Brooklyn, New York. I lived in a small apartment in Sunset Park and worked at a wonderfully suspicious pizzeria squished between a gas station and a porn shop. I didn’t save any money, but I had enough to survive a summer in the city.

That’s a whole other story, and not even for another time.

Let’s go back to university. As I entered my junior year, I decided to enroll in a course called Comparative Religions & Cultures, which would delve deep into folk religion and traditions in Taiwan, Thailand, India, and Turkey. I’d cut that year-long course in half, visiting only Taiwan and Thailand.

From there, I’d go to Australia for another semester to complete coursework on indigenous rights and environmentalism Down Under. Again, that’s another story—one that I’ll eventually get to.

For now, I was packing my bags again, this time heading to Taipei, Taiwan. I only studied there for around six weeks, meaning I have vignette-style stories to share with you. (Plus, one other expose on a surprisingly hilarious trip to a zazen meditation retreat.)

Part II / Dan Bing, Shilin Night Market, Japanese Italian food

As with most of our collegiate education, our small troop of students completed part of our coursework. This time, we were taking classes at Chengchi University, a highly acclaimed university with around 15,000 students.

Here’s what I remember most about university life in Taipei: the insanely delicious eats rimming the campus.

If you go to Taiwan, I have three suggestions based on my time there. First, try the Dan Bing, a crunchy, rice paper-wrapped omelet with American cheese. It’s similar to China’s jian bing, if you’ve had that. (Try jian bing, too!)

Second, eat at the Japanese-Italian-style chains in the city. Our dorms were located next to a Saizeriya restaurant, which is a Japanese-Italian-style chain. Is it Italian? No. It’s Japanese-style Italian. But it was a reliable option when I couldn’t handle any more sweet-sour flavors.

Third, don’t miss out on the sweet-and-sour flavors—get to know Taiwan’s foodie scene at its night markets. Once again, our dorms were centrally located, giving us access to Shilin Night Market. Taipei has many famous night markets—eat your way through them!

Part III / The clerb

Similar to the photo shoot at Mumbai’s Gateway to India (see Ch. 16), some Taiwanese people were interested in photo ops with Westerners. The photoshoot with strangers at the Gateway of India was but a paltry introduction to the celebrity to come in Taipei.

Along with plenty of late-night photoshoots with curious, respectful locals (usually around our age, in their early twenties), we were also given the keys to the city’s coolest nightclub.

It was atop Taipei 101, the city’s iconic and narrow skyscraper. I don’t remember which floor it was on, and my research to figure out which club was housed inside the skyscraper in 2013 isn’t yielding anything reliable. (Ah, the sands of time.)

Here’s what I do remember: The club promoters noticing me and a group of around seven to ten young, rowdy Western girls arriving, then ushering us to the dancefloor, which was empty. We saw that as a positive thing; more room to dance, less men to fend off.

Plus, the DJ was playing really good music. At the time, that was the RL Grime remix of Kanye West’s Mercy. I twerked so hard my jean shorts came unzipped. Yes, my jean shorts had a zipper. (Let’s not look too closely at any of this.) And because this was the 2010s, people still danced hard enough to sweat in the club.

Part IV / The Bunan tribe

Taipei wasn’t all clubbing. At one point, we left the city to head deep into Taiwan’s stunning, emerald mountains. We were invited to visit the Bunun tribe, an indigenous group living in the island’s central mountains in and around Hualien.

At the time, our class size was only around 14 students. I had been chosen as a ‘leader’, meaning that I would represent our group on these types of trips. Usually, it didn’t entail much.

With the Bunun tribe, that wasn’t the case. We arrived at the small mountain village with narrow paths trodden between the greenery and small, wooden buildings. We were received by a group, who promptly asked who our leader was. I looked at our two professors, who raised their eyebrows at me.

I stepped forward and presented myself. At which point, a very heavy machete was handed to me, along with a Bunun vest. I was to wear the vest and carry the machete with me at all points as the group leader, and walk ahead of the group when we were out hiking the trails. I was also given a bedee; a few villages watched to see if it would upset my stomach. It turned my face red, but I didn’t yak.

So that’s how I spent three days in the Taiwanese jungle wielding a heavy machete. A few other things I’d like to share about the Bunun tribe: men cook and serve the food, and they think a woman’s thighs should be big enough that when they rub together, it sounds like thunder.

Part V / The tiger’s head

I’ll cover my experience in Taiwan in one more World Tour of Oopsies post—but first, I want to point out one of my most impactful oopsies. Like I mentioned above, our dorms in Taipei were located near Shilin Market. You should go to eat your way through its food stalls, but it’s also a great bazaar for shopping.

Enter me and a good friend/fellow classmate wandering through Shilin multiple times, and finding ourselves entranced by massive, tiger-head backpacks. The tiger heads were large enough to be to scale, except they were covered in cheap fur and fitted with Styrofoam to keep their shape. They also had a zipper in the back, meaning they could be used as the world’s most haphazard backpack. (They’re now being sold at Walmart!)

We lost the battle against the tiger-head-backpack’s siren song.

Meaning we committed one grave travel sin: we overstuffed our bags very early on in our trip. Specifically, a 3.5-month journey across Asia for college. Except that the tiger-head backpack didn’t actually fit in any other backpack or suitcase, meaning it had to be toted separately.

Did my professors ever say it pissed them off to be slowed down at times due to two out of 14 students toting around to-scale backpacks shaped like tiger heads? No. But I would’ve rather had the machete, and I think they would’ve agreed.