Day 8 – The designated shopping day

We had finished mostly everything on our extensive list, and so decided to dedicate the day to shopping and other smaller things we hadn’t had a chance to do yet. After a long lay-in, Ultimate Noodle (Ximen Branch) was our first major stop, we arrived just after it opened and after sitting and filling in our ballot card of ramen choices (neat little decisions like: how rich do you want the broth, how hard/soft do you like your noodles, how spicy, etc) had a lovely bowl of garlic, black sesame and squid ink ramen – the Jet Black ‘Kuroo’ bowl, it was really good, best ramen I’ve had in ages.

We didn’t even manage to get down one street before Cordelia bought a bag from a nearby shop, a Taiwanese brand ‘uma hana’ had been catching her eye all week and I guess ‘shopping day’ was all the go ahead she needed to get the purse out. I took the opportunity to drag her to a nearby arcade I saw previously though (Hyper gamer in Ximen) where I pumped a few credits into Drummania, da best game and sadly one we still don’t have access to in the UK.

We would poke through a few underground malls and such before eventually deciding to turn our efforts to the ‘Wufenpu shopping district’, known for it’s wholesale outlet shops, in my head I thought this was going to be like a wide strip of some brand outlet shops, this was not the case.
After exiting the MRT and walking around in the rain for a bit, we found the shopping district, which promptly lead into a deep web of narrow roads and alleys filled with clothes shops, some of it was covered whilst other parts had been patched with makeshift tarps overhead to make it so shoppers could go through without being affected by the rain, which was perfect for us. I lost count of how many stores we looked through, we both got headaches from flipping our heads around so much checking out all the styles. Prices ranged from dirt cheap 100 TWD (£2.5) to more normal high street prices, but we found plenty of good deals around the £5-8 per item mark which seemed to be the sweet spot between cost and quality.

After shopping, back to the apartment to nurse my headache, I think I may have had a nap in a familymart and on the train back as well, so probably a fair chance I was pretty tired as well.

In the late evening, we set out north towards Shilin, for what I believe to be the biggest night market in Taiwan – and if it isn’t, i’d hate to see one larger.
The market sprawled for entire blocks, with different intensities and niches, there was a clear food street but we also found ourselves venturing down an indoor area filled with carnival/festival games aimed at kids and adults alike, with games where you fish live prawns, and plenty of some sort of mahjong game which we didn’t understand, a bunch of airsoft places too, I was really tempted to try the bow and arrow one but decided against it.
The market was really fun, though busy and hot as usual, though that said, much more spacious than the Raohe market from the other night, Shilin market was much more relaxed by comparison. We did end up seeing some sort of japanese TV show being filmed, with a few female jap presenters, no idea who they were though.

On the food street, I found a black pepper bun stall, they were inbetween batches and so we had to wait and queue for what felt like 10-15 minutes, the bun is made by folding marinated pork into dough with a bunch of spring onions, and then they stick it to the side of a clay oven filled with burning charcoal, and then scrape them out when the buns are done. I was so hungry, I ended up buying 3 as I was scared they would sell out and I wouldn’t be able to buy another without queuing again (the queue was very long due to the slow cooking process). Totally worth the wait, crispy flaky shell, soft bread on the inside coupled with juicy meat and a surprising amount of juice.
We’d also end up pigging on torched beef cubes, sweet potato puff balls, mango smoothie, a mango jelly thing, and then on our way walking back we got enticed in by the liquid nitrogen shop – these guys were having great fun just spraying the liquid nitrogen vapour into the crowd, creating a lovely cool whiteout (which sounds rude and obnoxious on paper, but in 33^C heat? very welcome.), we bought some biscoff cookie ice cream and some of the nitrogen puff snacks, which were kind of like corn puffs (think hard wotsits) which were swimming in a small pool of liquid nitrogen, you shake off the excess and then bite into it and all the white vapour pours out of your mouth/nose, nice and cooling too (though I think Cordelia got a cold burn by not shaking it).

I think we grabbed some bubble tea and another mango shaved ice on the way back, to mark our last night in Taiwan, there was a weird japanese amateur idol group dance/rave going on in Ximen which was also pretty entertaining.

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Day 9 –

We had to check out of the airbnb so unfortunately rushed out to Taipei Main in the morning to try and find a luggage locker, thankfully there are plenty there, and the lockers were pretty cheap too (about £5 for 9 hours storage for 2 large suitcases).

Lunch was a bit of a disappointment, a sushi place in one of the metro malls. From there it was on to the Miniatures museum of Taipei, an underground private museum filled with miniature houses and scenes, ranging from 1:12 scale to much smaller. Some of the exhibits were really impressive in scale and detail, I completely forgot to take my camera (locked it in the locker by accident without thinking) so only phone camera, which made things less fun. Still, hopefully you can appreciate some of the stuff from even the phone pictures.

I can’t really remember if we did anything afterwards, but the next thing I remember is going to the Guanghua electronics district – I was hoping to find a hard drive or maybe a new 140mm fan for the PC, but the amount of shops was a bit overwhelming. Many of the shops also didnt have clear pricing and I was too scared to try and ask. We did get to see tons of ridiculous gaming PC’s and monitors though, decked out in their RGB and water kits. We ventured into one of the older buildings which was filled with specialist shops, as a few examples, one shop had thousands of connectors and jacks, another specialized in walkie talkies, one had a huge microscope (i presume they did mobo or phone stuff?), data recovery experts, etc, it was kind of neat to see, though they didn’t seem to be doing too well in terms of business.

The last major stop was at the Shin Kong Mistukoshi department store near taipei main, where we had a little go through of the basement food levels for snacks and souvineers for the journey home (Cordelia bought loads of mango pocky) and we also had dinner in the basement food court (Ramen followed by a traditional almond tofu dessert for me).

The trip home was a painful one, taking almost 24 hours, an 8 hour flight to dubai, followed by 6 hour layover (delay) and then another 8 hours back to the London, a bus ride, etc. Absolutely exhausting and I didn’t get much sleep through it. Still, it could have been much worse, none of the plane journeys had children behind me etc so I guess there’s that.
That pretty much wraps up this holiday, thanks for reading! Now if you’ll excuse me, i’m going to sleep as i’ve got work in the morning :(

Day 7 – The long trip to Tamsui

Once again, we struggled to find breakfast this morning, this seems to be a surprisingly common occurence, not so much because of lack of places which offer breakfast, but our inability to understand the menu on these kind of establishments, which are primarily aimed at locals and run by locals who care not for the tourists who come to butcher their language and communicate by pointing. Somewhat depressingly we just had a quick snack stop at Familymart before moving on to the 228 Peace Memorial park around central Taipei.

The park was quite grand in scale and featured a strange modern art style obelisk thing at it’s centre, along with some more traditional pagodas and such, the memorial structure was quite impressively crafted and unfortunately impossible to capture in pictures. We didn’t actually know the background of the 2/28 event which this park stands for, but it was apparently an anti-government uprising in 2/28 1947, in which the government responded by slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, which is obviously very tragic and depressing in contrast with the park’s artistic feel.

dogbird. its half dog, and half bird.

Todays main event was the trip to Tamsui, at the very end of the red metro line some 20 stops away, a town by the coast which is now a popular tourist destination and home to a fishermans wharf along with an old street which sells plenty of street food, but along the way, we decided to stop at Guandu.
Guandu temple was an agonizing 15 minute walk or so from the station, through residential old roads with little shade, the weather was peaking at around 34 degrees or so today and as usual it was humid as F.

Guandu Temple is almost like a small town of temples of various sizes, it’s very possible that temples from across Taiwan apply to join and then move over if they pass the entrance exam. Despite that, I was really struggling to enjoy the temple when we first arrived as it was just too hot, all I could think about was tearing my skin off – we found some fans in the toilet and I ended up squatting by it for a good few minutes, only leaving because a family came in.
Thankfully one of the temples lay at the end of a long underground tunnel which was working nicely as a wind tunnel, similarly a bunch of the other temples were higher up, and apparently Guandu is pretty high already – the extra elevation made it nice and breezy and let me finally cool off a little. I’ll let the pictures do the talking for the temples, as we genuinely went into and saw about 7 or so, and temples are temples (though they were certainly intricately carved). A neat thing Guandu temple does is has a bunch of stamp pads for if you want to stamp your passport (I never even thought about stamping my passport with anything other than official stuff), unfortunately I didn’t have that with me, but I still had fun stamping my hand each time like some sort of serial night club reject. After finishing up, we were about to walk home when a taxi passed, which I promptly hailed down – $70 or £1.75 to not have to do that long walk in the sun was money well spent.

After some more stops on the train we arrived in Tamsui, the terminal stop, we set off down a random road to try and find some lunch, didn’t have much luck initially but eventually stumbled upon a chinese restaurant which served sim sum along with rice and bubble tea in gigantic 1L glasses. After lunch we walked the riverfront and took in the sights and sounds, shopped about in some of the quirky shops there before eventually deciding to keep walking north until we hit the fishermans wharf and lovers bridge – this was a mistake, as the walk turned out to be about an hour long and probably 3+ miles away. By the time we arrived, I was doing the open leg walk that men do to prevent balls sticking, the lovers bridge and fishermans wharf were certainly nice, as was the view, but if you are ever in the area, just take the bus or hire a bike at minimum. We caught another cab back to the station before finishing off Tamsui after the sun went down, with the old street and riverfront again for some street food – some cuttlefish and octopus along with some more bubble tea. To our surprise a lot of places were closing by about 8pm so we caught the train afterwards and finished up our street dinner at Ximen with a Gua bao and yakult slushie, while Cordelia sampled the Ay-chung rice noodles which I had yesterday.

Day 6 – The 4km Cable car ride

A bizarre dream about starting a fire in my house and then being sucked into the past, followed by an angry girlfriend complaining that I ruined her sleep by rolling over and stealing the covers all night. I left her home to sleep a little more while I went out to try and shop about a bit and find some breakfast, it seems weds morning is a bit of a down day for Taiwan, with many of the usual shops opening very late or not opening at all, I wasn’t really able to do any clothes shopping like I wanted. I did manage to catch the famous ‘Ay-Chung rice noodles‘ shortly after its opening, every night we’ve passed by this place there has been a huge queue down the road, many online blogs and food lists have this place down so I thought I had to take the opportunity and ordered a large bowl, its a bowl of slippery rice noodles in a thick sauce and served with some intestines and served with a spoon (which makes eating it incredibly difficult), it was really flavourful however a bit hardcore to eat steaming hot noodles while walking around on the 30 degree streets of Ximen, which detracted from the enjoyment somewhat, I brought it back to finish off in the aircon of the apartment.

Main destination of the day was the Maokong district, high up in the mountains and filled with teahouses, we rode the metro to Taipei Zoo station and then got the Maokong Gondola up (pay by Easycard 100 TWD), we were lucky enough to get a car to ourselves and got to take plenty of pictures as the Cable car rode up and down the mountains of Taipei, the car travelled some 4000m and went up to a maximum height around 280m, enough to see the city and even Taipei 101 peaking over one of the other mountains.

Once actually in the maokong area we took the tour bus over to one of the temples for a vista, before riding it back to the cable car station and then hiking around the mountain to see the tea houses and tea centre. There really were plenty of places to drink tea, all with fantastic views of the city, the prices of course were a little higher than usual due to most of the visitors being tourists and I suppose the added difficulty of bringing anything up there. We had tea ice cream in one of the teahouses, as well as a cold milk tea made from some tea blend I can’t recall. There were a few temples up there as well, and the aforementioned tea promotion centre where we got to see some info on how tea is made, and sample some as well, There was a koi pond inside as well which we took some time to feed.
I’m unsure if I was just hungry, but theres an old woman selling Taiwan sausages near the gondola station, and they were SO good, barbequeued and coated in a slightly sweet sticky sauce and fatty and just the right amount of crisp and chewiness, 10/10 recommended.

Mountain tea ice creams

Mountain ice milk tea

By the time we got back to the city after taking the gondola car down and hiking about the mountain, we watched a nearby dancing fountain show and then headed off to find dinner. We ended up in the Taiwan one piece restaurant, which I’m personally not a fan of, but I do enjoy seeing the effort to theme it, to my surprise the cafe was completely empty and we had the whole place to ourselves, which made taking pictures significantly less embarrassing (I mean, probably judgement by the staff but surely they are used to it). I’ll let the pictures do the talking, but it was all pretty neat and one piece themed, I just wish I recognised more of it.

Last stop was Raohe market, surprisingly our first night market this holiday in Taiwan – a manic street filled with food and honestly not that much else, whilst there were a few shops for socks, bags and clothes, the majority of Raohe market was street food. We really made a big mistake of eating first as there was such a massive variety of stuff on offer, but I didn’t have the appetite for any of it, in particular I really wanted to try the black pepper bun but there was only one stall and it literally had a shop sized area just for queueing for it. The random wafts of stinky tofu was rampant here too, and there was really nowhere to run due to how busy it was, I wish I could read Mandarin as there were loads of foods on offer which I wasn’t familiar with.

Day 5 – A trip into the mountains

Found out that my last post didn’t upload properly, looks like the post is gone and the website has killed itself as well, hope that sorts itself out as I can’t really do much from here as our Airbnb is on some third world internet connection.

After yesterday’s relatively uneventful day, we were going for a large excursion out today, a trip to the Pingxi district far east of Taipei in the mountain region. Navigation was a nightmare, as it seems to be way underdocumented online and signage in the station is painful at best, but that’s maybe getting ahead – i’ll start with breakfast.
Also prepare for a long one.

Doing some research the past night for places to eat in Ximen, a few common stores kept popping up, alongside hot-star fried chicken, the other chicken place we ate at, and the mango shaved ice shops we already visited, a frequent contender was a small local looking place called 365 something, about as shabby as it gets for a brick and mortar, with a hot plate out on the street where they attract people in and simultaneously cheekily expand their shopfront out onto the road, we were always put off by the lack of any proper english on the menu at the front, but we thought we were feeling brave today, I wanted to try the taiwan staple Lou Rou Faan – Braised pork rice. After confusedly seating ourselves, and then realising we would have to place our own orders, I went back to the front to pick up what was essentially a self serve form, a bit like a multiple choice ballot paper where you can order food – it was all in chinese. We basically had to play ‘match the character’ with each dish we wanted to order until the form was complete and then out came the tasty food – we ordered 2 bowls of the braised pork rice, some fried turnip cake and a tasty mysterious thick noodle soup, along with some bubble tea, all of it delicious and came to a daylight robbery-esque price of only £6 or so.

As we reached the station, I realised I hadn’t yet ‘relieved’ myself of the buffet food we ate yesterday, there was probably a small childs worth of cake and sashimi waiting to come out, and it was making itself known. Unfortunately for me, the metro toilets were squat style – I’ve never had to use one before, or at least, never for number 2. I Prepared for the worst, hanging my shorts and underwear on the door (surely people dont normally just drop trou to ankles? what if you shit inside the back of your shorts?), I took up the best squat I could and braced onto the pole attached to the wall (mildly terrified of ‘what if the pole comes off from the wall’). I can tell you that squat toilets are disgusting. It was shitting on the floor or something, it stuck out at weird angles before flopping down sideways, I must have missed a bit as there was a bit stuck to the rim and it fell down afterwards, i’ve save you any more details but I was mortified and glad that at least I didn’t shit onto my sandals.

After plenty of stress work in and out of the toilet, we arrived at Shifen – a town practically in the middle of nowhere, where people walk on the train line and the shops all surround it, the train was blasting its horn to get people out of the way as it rolled into town. Shortly after arriving I got to try a peanut icecream roll – made by using a wood planer on a solid block of peanut brittle, and then putting the shavings onto a kind of crepe with some ice cream and other bits, it was delicious.
A little further down the track, masses of people were enjoying the main attraction of the Pingxi district, releasing lanterns into the sky, the huge colourful paper lanterns come in various colours (for luck in different fields) and you write your wishes onto them and then release them from the train track – there are masses of shops specializing in it, and they all get business because it really did seem to be a constant activity. We bought and painted on one from a more professional looking shop, costing only $200 TWD (£5) and releasing it into the sky.

The other thing people come to Shifen for is the waterfall, which was a painfully long and hot walk for what must have been at least 2 miles down and up staircases, across suspension bridges and all sorts, really scenic but god was it hot and humid. I hope the pictures were worth the sweat.

We arrived back in town just in time to see the train roll up, we jumped on and headed to Ruifang station, before catching the bus to our next major stop of the day Jiufen. Jiufen is an old mining town up in the mountains, like waaay up the mountain. It’s also allegedly some of the inspiration towards spirited away, though how much truth in that, i’m not sure, it certainly had it’s fair collection of ghibli themed shops around.

We went up the old street, a narrow collection of alleys surrounded by shops which went up the mountain before ending around a giant temple. The tight streets and close proximity of the shops meant business was fierce, with plenty of food, snack and tea shops offering tasters as you went up, there were also some quirkier shops along the way as well like the condom shop, a weird place filled with masks, and a shop filled with cat things. The tight streets also meant smells were intensified too, both the good and the bad, i’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but the first few days we were in Ximen, we’d get whiffs of sewage or something and would try and work out where it was coming from, turns out it was Taiwans infamous Stinky tofu – now imagine that, but strategically placed into a narrow alley, just before a long set of stairs upwards, so the smell drifts up and follows you as you climb – Why Taiwan, Why.

An alright dinner towards the top, and then a slow climb back down before catching the bus and train to go back home, we were exhausted from walking all day and the sun was coming down. We went on a bit of a food spree as we got back to Taipei, grabbing some cheap sushi, bubble tea, and ‘taiwan burger’ which is like pulled pork and crispy veg in a steamed bun, topped with some sweet and spicy sauce, it was really goddamn tasty and totally worth it for £1.25.

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Travel Tips for Shifen / Pingxi and Jiufen which would have been useful to know:
– Pingxi is both a town and a district, while you can ride the pingxi line to Pingxi itself, the lantern experience most people describe can easily be had at Shifen, which has the waterfall as well.
– Approx 40 mins to Ruifan Stn from Taipei Main Stn, and then 20ish mins to Shifen, i think
– Cost from Taipei Main to Shifen was only 61 TWD
– Lantern cost anywhere between $100 and $350, ours was $200 but they charge based on colours and include photography and paint for you
– Shifen waterfall walk is about 30-45mins maybe? There are toilets and food/drink along the way
– Bus to jiufen from Ruifang Stn is route 827 or 788, catch it from next to the police station – Exit main entrance and take a left at the Wellcome supermarket, police Stn on opposite side of road. Bus itself takes about 10-20 mins
– The train to taipei from Ruifang will be written just past the main gate, the train might be flagged as a North destination line even though it goes to Taipei.

Day 4
This was initially a lot longer, but the blog didn’t post it for some reason, and it was lost, so im having to type it up again at a later date, some details probably missing.

The sky was threatening to fall again this morning, so we got a move on for the outdoor things as soon as possible.
Initially we were going to do the gondola today but apparently it’s closed on Mondays, so good thing we found that out before departing for it.
We grabbed some small snack things from 7-Eleven, the convinience shops in this country double as snack places in most cases, selling Bao, tea eggs, sausages, oden and ramen, along with seating and a microwave for if you want to heat up and eat microwave meals in the store.

First major stop of the day was Longshan temple, a weird mix of old and new – you can’t help but look and wonder when you see the contrast between ancient classical looking chinese gate, and huge LED ticker underneath it, similarly there was a massive artificial waterfall just inside the entrance – beautiful but odd.
The weather was another scorcher, so we’d wander around the temple taking shade and stealing gusts of air-con from the staff building where possible. I suspect Monday is a day of mourning for the Taiwanese, as we saw plenty of fire buckets along the way, and inside the place was heaving with locals praying with joss sticks, we tried to stay out of their way where possible, but for a change the locals vastly outnumbered the tourists.

Not too far away, we skipped along the metro to Daan park, which we didn’t actually have on our list but thought we’d do anyway – seemed to have a wide selection of trees, with a strange one which I hadn’t really see much before, kind of growing whisker branches out and then they fall down and turn into roots, making the tree look like it’s trying to rise out of melted cheese.

We were desperate for a cool down, and so headed to Taipei 101, sure that they would have a nice shaved ice place to cool down, and they did! The bottom few floors of Taipei 101 is a mall apparently, complete with massive food court, we grabbed some tasty shaved ice with mango and tapioca, it came with a pudding too. We’d savour the aircon a little more while wondering around, opting not to bother going up the tower itself as we already did the Burj Khalifia this holiday, and another £15 each to go up.

Back to Taipei Main station to waste time before the primary event of the day, I forget if I mentioned yesterday, but before settling on Coco Curry we went to a japanese buffet place which was fully booked, we made a reservation for tonight and basically planned our entire day around it.
We had an hour to burn so we walked the Taipei metro mall, an underground mall which goes on for maybe a mile or so, got to try the new Bemani music game Nostalgia which was interesting. We also found a ton of gacha machines and spent some time looking through them, I got a little hotplate beef keychain.

We had arrived, Shin-yeh is a fairly expensive (£25 pp) japanese themed buffet with no limits except time, eat as much as you like on sushi, sashimi, roll sushi, roast meats, shabu shabu, beer, tempura, grilled fish and meat, cakes and puddings and loads more I can’t even begin to remember. Almost everything was in mandarin so for us it was also a mystery pick and mix which made things more fun – a prime example, little shot glasses of stuff near the sushi, is it sake? a dip? alcohol? vinegar? nope, just apple juice (i think!?). They give you 2 hours to eat, which seemed like loads at the time, but after eating our fill and watching the chef come out to carve the fish for the sashimi, etc, we stayed almost the whole 2 hours.

We waddled back home to Ximen afterwards to walk off the food, in the heavy rain. We took a few random turns to see where we’d end up, It turns out what we thought was Ximen was actually just a small slice of it, there were whole blocks of neon shops which we had never seen before, we got kind of lost until we eventually found our way back.

Our day started with us going 6 floors up to a restaurant which wasn’t even open yet, the information we had read on the internet was wrong and so there we were all ready to eat and nowhere to go – thankfully Ximen has no shortage of places to find food – we settled on Taiwans famous fried chicken breast, which could basically be considered a gigantic chicken nugget depending on how you look at it, we coupled it with some iced tea as well for an authentic experience (Lychee black tea, mmm).

The forecast this morning said 80% chance of rain, with 100% chance of rain from 2-6pm, but venturing out to find breakfast we found clear blue skies and toasty 30 degree heat, I decided to head back and grab my sunglasses etc. before taking advantage of the skies (while they last) to go to CKS Memorial hall, a few stops away on the metro.

We weren’t really expecting the scale of the CKS area, with 2 gigantic temple structures straight outside the metro station, and a massive white and blue tower thing towards the end of the plaza, opposite an equally large traditional gate, was thankful I had a chance to grab my snuglasses as the heat and sun were really out in force today (I probably should have put some sun lotion on as well). We were in time for the changing of the guard ceremony again, or 15 minutes early, enough time for us to wait behind the barriers as they were set up, and get prime location for the ceremony – which lasted for a shocking 15+ minutes, consisting of marching, shouting, gun twirling, gun inspection, lots of stomping, and so on, honestly kind of repetitive by the end and confusing as to why it would go on for so long for a simple changing of the guard ceremony which happens every hour or so. Cordelia started feeling a bit sick by the end so we went and chilled for a bit and grabbed some drinks before continuing.

Wanting to make the most of the weekend, I found out about a flower market and we set off to go find and explore it. The market is actually a car park during the week, set under a suspended motorway and goes on for literally at least a mile, maybe more, we didn’t get to the end of it because it just kept going and going, definitely the longest market i’ve ever seen. Mist was being sprayed from pipes in the ceiling for the plants, which was cool to see but obviously made the place incredibly humid.

On the opposite side of the junction where the flower market starts was the weekend Jade Market, this one I had never actually heard of, but being that we were literally across the road, we headed in to take a look. This one was smaller but much more densely packed, with hundreds of individual vendors with small tables packed into another parking lot – this one was smaller but also air conditioned thankfully, as everyone inside would have almost certainly died by now without AC. As you would expect, the majority of the booths were selling Jade goods – bangles, earrings, carved pendants, etc. However all other gemstones and jewellery were also on sale. I don’t think many of the sellers get much business, as they seemed tired and happy to play on their phone in front of you, I do wonder how or if any of them make a profit with 200ish similar stalls around.

Another thing which wasn’t on our list but we visited anyway, was the huashan 1914 creative park – described as an old winery turned creative hub, the winery was now a strange mix of old architecture and modern trendy shops and cafes, with some amateur performers and plenty of youngsters roaming about, I imagine it’s quieter on weekdays but we had come on a Sunday and the place was very busy. Not a massive amount more to say about it, we had a good wander but didn’t stay too long as it was just so crowded.

Dinner at coco curry, a Japanese chain specializing in katsu curry and then a long walk back to Ximen from central station. We did initially plan to go to a Japanese buffet restaurant but it was booked out, so we’ve reserved it for tomorrow, the only English name on their reservation sheet. We also passed by an ‘Animate’ store on the way home, filled with super cheap manga and anime/idol goods, it’s a shame the books are all in Chinese because £2.50 per manga volume is crazy cheap and they had a massive selection.

contact juggler

animate

Day 1 – travel from Dubai and Arrival

Our first day in Taiwan was basically a throwaway, the plane departed Dubai at 3:40am so we already wasted a bunch of time in the airport just waiting for take-off time to roll around.
The flight thankfully didn’t feel too long, I didn’t feel like I slept for much of it, but at the same time I think I was drifting in and out of consciousness, as it only felt like I was fully awake for 1 or 2 hours of the 8 hour flight.

After arriving in Taiwan, doing immigration and waiting a long time for our luggage to appear, we set off to try and work out how to get to Taipei central by train, before going to Ximending where our Airbnb was, stepping out of the metro system to Ximen was crazy, reminding me of the time we came out into Tokyo for the first time. In particular it felt so crazy considering we just came from Dubai, whose city vibes seemed almost professional – I guess they don’t bother putting much out because nobody really walks around outdoors there as it’s too hot.

We dropped our bags off and got acquainted with our home for the next week – sporting a pretty barebones setup, super hard bed and noisy air-con unit. It’s not really the nicest place I have to admit, but it’s in a fantastic location at least and the price was pretty good.

After freshening up, we headed out to explore Ximen, and eat dinner, we thought we’d make it memorable by going to the famous ‘Modern Toilet’ restaurant, themed around toilets – you sit on toilets, eat out of toilet bowls, get drinks served in urinals, eat chocolate ice cream shaped like… you get the idea. The food was decent, though obviously the main attraction was the decor. We had a little shop around afterwards before heading back home for some much needed sleep.

Ximen

Modern toilet restaurant

modern Toilet tom yum goong

Ximen

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Day 2

The night was noisy, even with the earplugs I was wearing, the aircon was loud and a nearby dog wouldn’t stop howling at the moon.

After a sleepy start, we would go in search of a restaurant recmomended to us by our Airbnb host, a place a short walk away called ‘Lao Wang Ji beef Noodles’, the actual name of course was entirely in mandarin, and so pretty difficult for us to try and find, especially as that road had 3 different places all specializing in beef noodles. We found our place in the end, or rather, we found the queue for it. From experience, the best places to eat in asia are the ones with queues outside, just follow the locals. It was amazing – super soft chunks of braised beef with slippery noodles, in a flavorful fatty broth, worth trying if you are ever around Ximen in Taipei.

We’d head up north a bit to try and do some sightseeing, first major stop being the Martyr’s Temple, a huge temple ground with grand gate, we arrived just in time to watch the changing of the guard as well, a march which seemed kind of comical to watch as they freeze in time at the middle of their marching step, the result looks more like a ‘World order’ music video than a military march.

We didn’t really know how to get back to the station and so ended up just jumping on a random bus, in the hopes that it would get us back to any metro station, the buses in Taiwan aren’t particularly frequent, nor are they easy to read for the chinese impaired, it ended up dropping us outside Yuanshan station, featuring a farmers market and underpass area filled with teens practising dance routines, naturally one of them was doing a choreographed routine to All-star by smash mouth, I guess somebody once told them as well.

Martyrs temple

world order march

Martyrs temple

Farmers market

Dance practice area

£1 bubble teas

Was initially going to take the train to another area but on a whim decided to try and find a cafe or something where we could cool down and have a drink, we instead stumbled upon the Confucius temple and Dalongdong temple across the way, and so stopped to take pictures.
Also had my first proper bubble tea, which was delicious and also dirt cheap at only £1 for a large cup.

Still desperate to cool down, we headed for Main station and the adjoining mall for a bit of shopping and lunch, the basement 3 level of the mall was filled with food shops so we’d end up having an assortment of baked goods before doing some general shopping around – I was told that the clothing in Taiwan was pretty cheap so I only actually packed 2/3 of a suitcase, as I hope to refresh my wardrobe.

We were pretty tired by this point, and so walked back to the airbnb, I quite needed a shower after walking around in the heat, came out to see Cordelia had fallen asleep so and so we had a little while to rest before heading out for another wander around Ximen, this time however we decided to sample some of the street food instead of having a traditional dinner, and so had some fried chicken, squid, ‘onion cakes’ and then some mango shaved ice for dessert.