Taipei

On our way back to the States we purposefully scheduled a long lay over in Taipei, Taiwan. Neither of us had been to this city, so we were excited to check it out. We took a bus from the airport to downtown and cruised around to see what we could see. We had a fantastic day and we're super impressed with Taipei and the unbelievably friendly people we met there.


The picture is too small for you to see the temperature on the Panasonic sign behind Uche, but it says that it's 16 Celsius, which is 60 Fahrenheit. That's pretty 30+ degrees colder than where we had been in Manila. We enjoyed spending a day walking around without sweating.


This is Taipei 101. It's currently the world's tallest building, but will be eclipsed by a building in Dubai this fall. It's really a pretty building and definitely dominates the Taipei skyline.


Uche's almost as tall as 101....



You could buy tickets to go to an observation deck, but it was kind of cloudy so we didn't know if we would see anything if we went up, so we just took our picture next to this mural.



Inside 101 there's a fancy mall. We did a little window shopping, but were afraid to go in the stores. What if we broke something and we had to pay for it?? And those bright pink flowers in the big pots are orchids. There were tons of orchids through out the mall and they were gorgeous.




These motorbikes seem to be the transportation choice of many Taiwanese. They had little parking lots cut out of the wide sidewalks all over the place and they were all full. Uche was checking them out.




This is me in front of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. We had no idea what it was commemorating as all the signs were in Chinese. But I found out later it's a memorial to Dr. Sun Yat-sen founding father of the Republic of China.


This was taken from the memorial stairs looking out to 101.

There's park surrounding the memorial with a little lake where we had to take a self portrait.




We walked down to a night market with a side trip to eat some dumplings from a roadside stall. The night market was super fun to look around. I found some great shoes. We had to buy an umbrella because it started raining. The rain limited our time there, but we did manage to buy some tea and dinner.

Here's my dinner. I went with the recognizable since I'm a wimpy eater. The food was laid out like a buffet and we'd just point to what we wanted or use tongs to pick up what we wanted. They'd charge you by the number of food items you chose. It came with rice and soup. It was cheap and delicious!

Here's Uche's meal. He enjoyed his fish and tofu and other veggies. We're not the greatest with chopsticks, so at one point, Uche took one chopstick and just started stabbing at his eggplant. It was more effectice than trying to pick it up.

After a full day of walking around the city we rode a bus back to the airport and availed of the free massage chairs. Uche looks like he's pretty excited about the next 10 minutes. You can see me below mid massage. These chairs may be the reason we think Taipei airport is fantastic!!