Exploring Taipei

Today we throughly explored the city of Taipei!(walking roughly 25k steps)

To start, we walked from our hotel to Dihua street, which is the oldest street in Taipei. This was a really fun walk, filled with market stalls and food vendors. We found a cute second floor coffee shop overlooking the street and had some fantastic drinks there.

After we’d had our fill of Dihua street, we returned to the shopping mall from yesterday to try Din Tai Fun. When we got there they told us it would be a 1.5 hour wait- we were ready for this, and had fun exploring the mall and catching up with family over FaceTime.

Once our time was up, we headed to Din Tai Fun and had an absolute blast ordering all sorts of Taiwanese dishes there. The food and service were impeccable!

After lunch, we headed to the Baoan temple, which was beautiful to see, and then immediately left from there to the National Palace Museum.

The National Palace Museum houses many historic Chinese artifacts, and it was very cool to check out their many exhibits. We particularly liked their exhibits on ancient pottery, weaponry, and jade carving.

Following the museum we headed to Elephant Mountain for a short hike with an absolutely killer view of the Taipei skyline. There were tons of mosquitos out here, so we were both thankful for our bug spray!

After the hike, we metro’d to Taipei 101 to check out the tallest tower in Taiwan. This was a bit of a tourist trap as there was a huge wait, but when we finally got to the top we really enjoyed the views. The coolest part of the building though was being able to see the dampener in the center of the building, which was a massive heavy ball built into the center of the building to help minimize wind sway.

After visiting Taipei 101 we took the metro to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, which is an absolutely massive memorial in honor of a former president of the republic of China. The memorial is bordered by a huge theater and concert hall, so the entire area this is based is pretty neat to see.

After the memorial we made our way to the Ximending neighborhood, to check out what we’d heard was a vibrant area similar to Tokyo. This neighborhood was nuts; it was elbow to elbow crowded with music blaring and lights flashing. We saw many people with snakes, a man with a pet squirrel, and a guy selling puppies. There were bars, restaurants, and revelry everywhere. It felt a bit like different parts of Tokyo, but had its own flair. In any case, Chris got a gourmet Taro and salted egg waffle for dinner(apparently it’s popular Hong Kong street food) and Chelsea got tofu pudding. The street food was fantastic, and well worth the journey!

Finally, after a whole lot of steps we called it a night. Tomorrow we will explore the city of Jiufen, which was the inspiration for the movie spirited away.Read more