Taiwan Vacation: Taipei

On August 11, we flew to Taiwan for a 9 day vacation! With Taiwan's close ties to China and one of their primary languages being Mandarin, we thought this vacation would give us an insight on the Chinese culture. Plus it's only a 3 hour flight from Japan. This was the first time traveling that we didn't book anything in advance. Luckily, we had no problems finding hotels and transportation along the way. We began and ended our trip in the Northern capital city Taipei and spent the majority of the vacation traveling along the east coast.

Taipei:

Shilin Night Market: The first night we spent at the Shilin night market. This market was a typical Asian market with a ton of cheap clothes and weird foods. One thing that surprised us were the amount of dogs for sale. There were dozens of pet shops selling puppies that looked only a week or 2 old. We had never seen such small puppies for sale before. We found it sad and disturbing. We also saw a stand where you could pay to do ear candling. This is when a hollow candle is placed in your ear and then lit on fire to have the wax burned out (picture below). We've actually done this at home before!

Within the Shilin Night Market was a great food market. There were rows and rows of vendors cooking and selling all different kinds of food. It took us a while to get the nerve to eat at one, but once we did, we were pleasantly surprised! We ate dumplings and an omelet.

Taipei 101- This was our favorite sight in Taipei. Taipei 101 is currently the tallest building in the world (101 floors, 508m tall). The building was built to resemble a stalk of bamboo. We took the fastest elevator in the world to the observation deck in only 37 seconds! The views from the top were amazing; great views of the city and the mountains. They offered a free audio set in English that told us what we were looking at on each side of the building, which was really interesting.

Taipei 101 Mall- Inside Taipei 101 was a huge 6 story mall that was full of designer shops and nice restaurants. We spent a few hours shopping here one day.

Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall- This is a Chinese-style memorial dedicated to Taiwan's first dictator. The National Theatre and Concert Hall are also on the grounds.

Martyr's Shrine War Memorial- This enshrines the dead of the wars fought on behalf of the Republic of China. The main attraction at this shrine is to see the guards that stand absolutely still for 1 hour until they are replaced with a new guard. It was amazing how they didn't even move their eyes!

National Palace Museum- This museum is the most famous and popular attraction in Taipei. It has the world's finest collection of Chinese art as old as 8,000 years! We were surprised to learn that Western art only began to appear about 80% of the way through Chinese art history. We walked around the museum for about an hour until everything started looking the same. Unfortunately we couldn't take pictures inside.

Chinese Temple- We also visited a small Chinese temple in Taipei. The temples in Taiwan are very different than Japanese temples. They are very colorful, gaudy, and have a lot of dragons.

Our impression of Taipei: We really enjoyed visiting Taipei. Even though large cities usually have the same feel to us, we were able to see a lot of cultural sights that made it unique. We were really surprised how many people spoke English. Just about everyone we spoke to was able to carry on a conversation or answer our questions. We also thought the subways were clean and really easy to use since they were in English. Another surprise for us was how developed the city was. We were expecting to see much lower living conditions than we came across. No one ever bothered us and we never felt in danger. Since we've been away from home for a year now, we loved how many American restaurants the city had and we ate at every Western restaurant we came across: Subway, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, and McDonald's!

The #1 shock for us was how many Starbucks Taipei had...it literally seemed like one on every other corner! We were in heaven! Overall, Taipei is a great city, but after a couple of days we were ready to see what the rest of Taiwan had to offer. See our next blog about our time spent on the east coast!