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How to meet people in Taipei when you're travelling alone
Taipei is gentle with people on their own. Night-market food is sold in portions of one, the MRT is spotless and easy, and if you stand looking lost for more than ten seconds somebody will ask, in careful English, whether you need help. You can have a very good week here without company.
You can have a better one with it, and the city has three things that make finding it easy.
The rechao problem
Rechao, the stir-fry joints with the plastic stools, the tanks of live seafood and the beer fridge you help yourself from, are the best cheap eating in Taipei. Dishes are a hundred or so NT dollars each and arrive fast and in quantity. They are also portioned and priced for a table of four to six, and eating at one alone is like going to a football match alone: allowed, and slightly sad.
That is your opening line. "Rechao tonight, 7pm, four seats" is the most natural plan a stranger can propose in this city, and the one people say yes to fastest. The same goes for hotpot, which nobody has ever ordered for one on purpose.
The staircase everyone climbs
Elephant Mountain, Xiangshan, is a twenty-minute stair climb from the MRT station of the same name to the view of Taipei 101 that is on every postcard. At sunset the top is a small crowd of people who arrived alone and are now taking each other's photos. It is the lowest-effort shared plan in the city: "Xiangshan at 5:30" needs no explanation and no fitness.
For a real day out, Yangmingshan is the national park at the north edge of the city, reached by bus from Jiantan or the main station, with the grasslands of Qingtiangang and hot springs on the way down in Beitou. The public open-air bath in Beitou Park is cheap and mixed, swimsuit required, and a group that has hiked together has no trouble sitting in hot water together afterwards.
Neighbourhoods where the tables are close
Gongguan, around National Taiwan University, has the student prices, the language-exchange nights and the board-game cafés, which Taipei takes seriously; a board-game café is a place where four strangers have a reason to sit at one table for three hours, and that is worth knowing. Yongkang Street and the lanes of Da'an are the café district. Chifeng Street by Zhongshan station is the small-shop-and-coffee quarter where the same faces reappear at weekends.
Night markets are for food more than for meeting, but pick the small ones: Ningxia is compact and all about eating, Raohe has the pepper buns at the gate. Shilin is the biggest and the one you can lose a friend in.
Practical
An EasyCard works on the MRT, buses and YouBike, the public bikes. The MRT stops around midnight, so a plan is either done by then or committed to a night out. Scooters have the right of way in practice, whatever the law says; look twice. July to September is typhoon season, and when one is announced the city closes and everyone stays in, which is not the worst day to have a group chat.
Taipei is one of the safest cities in Asia. The rules are the usual: first meeting in public, tell someone where you are going, keep your own way home. The safety page has the rest.
Where MeetMap fits
MeetMap is a map of small plans happening soon near you. Each pin has a time, a place and a number of seats; take one and you are in the group chat. In Taipei the plans that fill are the ones this city already runs on: "Rechao in Gongguan, 7pm, four seats", "Xiangshan at 5:30", "Yangmingshan Saturday, back by 4".
If the map is quiet, post the first one. The rechao table is not going to shrink to fit you; find three people to fit it. Two weeks of that is the whole method.
