Taipei

We have arrived in Taiwan. We’ve spent our first four nights in Taipei and a couple of days travelling down the county. It’s a great mixture of Japanese culture, a little Chinese but unique in its own right.

In Taipei we had the pleasure of sharing a very small room, hostel style, with a double bed and bunk beds and not much room for anything else. Accommodation is much more expensive and much of it is pretty dated, we’ve not quite got the hang our sweet spot yet! As you will see!!

Taipei was great, we headed straight up Taipei 101. It used to be the tallest building in the world, until everyone else built some bigger ones!! The kids got the best candy floss I’ve ever seen made from a machine.(check out the pic) We went to the zoo, which was really good and had a bonus gondola ride to get there. We ate at what is considered to be the best place for dumplings in the world, drank a beer or two in the LGBTQ 🏳️‍🌈 area and I also brought a camera which is pretty cool. I really enjoyed Taipei and we will most likely head back there for a few more days before we fly out of Taiwan.

We got our first High Speed Rail (HSR) down to a town called Taichung. We were excited about getting a larger room as we were craving space, but soon released it was in a massive hotel, so there was nowhere to hang when the kids had gone to sleep. So, choices were lights out early or as we did one night set up the bog bar, where we enjoyed a few beers sat in/on the toilet! Oh the exciting life of travelling with fun sponges! (Sorry I meant the kids)!
Nice city though, went to the natural history museum, also to a illusion museum (see if you can spot the pics!) and ate at a very famous ice cream place!
We’ve attempted a few night markets, food here can be a little eccentric, lots of nasty animal bits up for offer. The challenge has been to find a restaurant which meets all our children’s needs , Otto only wants meat and Freda will only eat veggie. NIGHTMARE!!!
The kids have got obsessed though, not with the food, but the grabber and toy vending machines which seem to pop up in every other shop! They can’t quite understand why they never win on the grabbers!!! Mitch is getting very annoyed wasting all our money! Kids 🤣

We moved on to a smaller town today, called Lukang, touted as the Kyoto of Taiwan! I have to say that is a little far fetched! Anyway we had fun managed to kill some time, took a tour down a narrow alley named touch breast street, saw a few cool temples and stumbled upon a very loud and an extremely amusing festival. Highlights were a man hitting his back with many weapons including a ball covered in pins so blood streamed out, crazy guys with branches on the end of large poles and girls pole dancing while traditional costume clad folk paraded down the road to a temple!! Bonkers!

As the only westerners at the party we started to attract too much attention (mainly Otto being continuously filmed by a guy) so had to swiftly depart back to our hotel that Mitch had managed to book for us.
Turned out to be a sex (love) hotel!!! Upside kids really loved the massive jacuzzi bath! Downsides I have to explain to Freda what the sex toy vending machine in our bedroom is. Our bed side table is nicely set up with a condom, lighter, ashtray and some tissues!!!
Needless to say we are out of here tomorrow and heading to the hills!Read more