The Fun In Taipei

This was started two Monday’s ago and then I finished the rest today, sorry that it has taken me so long to finish.
Man, after this weekend I feel so much older than my actual age- I am so tired and sore and keep on wondering why I do certain things to myself. I know, I know you are probably wondering what the heck I am talking about, I guess that I should just start from the beginning of my weekend.
Thursday afterschool I had two tutoring jobs and then the plan was that we would be leaving very soon after them, the plan was also that Natalie was going to pack while I did my tutoring and then we would be able to leave- though instead of Natalie doing that she played with the kids for the whole time and wasn’t ready when I finished. I packed quickly and Natalie took longer to pack- it wasn’t that we were late or anything but I guess that I just function that if we are going to leave at a certain time I try to be ready at that time and if I am ready and the other person is not I get a little annoyed.
Anyway we finally got on our way, me riding like I was a little drunk as I had my bag in my basket and it was a little heavy, so it made it a little weird to ride. We had never ridden to the train station before so we wanted to leave a little early to be on the safe side, we found the train station and decided that we were hungry and that we would go look for some food close by, we wandered for a little bit and didn’t really see any place that was serving food food, so sadly we went into 7-11. I got something that Natalie had said that she tried before and that she liked it, what both of us got we ended up not liking- I am pretty sure that mine had mushrooms or something else that is not really to my liking, I didn’t finish mine but Natalie did. There was another 7-11 across the street from the train station so we went in there to see if there was something else that I could try, not really though I did get a drink and a little something to snack on. When we were finished we quickly found somewhere to lock our bikes (it was kind of hard to find a pole to lock it to- normally we don’t worry about that but because we were going to be gone for several days we wanted to lock it to something) and then ran inside.
We ran upstairs and where we thought that we had several minutes until we had to leave the train was already there (we forgot that the train starts in Hualien), we kind of freaked out that it was going to be a short stop like it normally is at other places, so we quickly got on the train. I at first started trying to do some stuff on my laptop but quickly realized that it was not going to happen so I closed up my laptop and went to sleep and slept most of the way to Taipei. I have realized that I can quickly fall asleep on the train and sleep most of the way. Finally we arrived in Taipei, it took us a little bit to find Christina- last time that we had come Grace was with us and knew exactly where to go, but this time they were doing some construction so I didn’t really recognize where to go. We went straight home and went straight to bed (for which I was very grateful).
Friday morning I was able to sleep in until like 9, which felt very nice- except for the fact that I was sleeping on a very, very, very, very hard (did I mention that it was hard?) mat, so my back was hurting a little bit. When I was awake enough to comprehend I jumped into the shower (though I guess it is not technically called jumping when there is no separation between the rest of the bathroom and the shower :D), I showered pretty fast so that Natalie could shower also and then we could head out and have a day of adventures. Once we both had showered and had some breakfast Christina took us to the zoo where we caught the train (yep it was a little hard to catch, but we succeeded :D) and took it to the city hall, we got off and had some yummy lunch- spaghetti and garlic bread (oh how I miss my pasta) and then did a little bit of shopping. We found some really really cute shoes that I absolutely loved, but sadly my size of shoe is not very common here and if they have them they are generally tennis shoes or the like. Natalie ended up getting the shoes but I was really sad that I couldn’t get them. When we had finished our lunch and shopping we went and caught the train again to where we met Max and his friend. *Max is a friend of Grace’s, because she was not there and because Christina had other stuff to do he had volunteered (well I think they asked and he said that he would) to be our tour guide for the day.
Once we found them we quickly jumped on a bus that took us right to the front door of Taipei 101. It is an amazing thing to stand outside at the bottom of 101 and look up. When I stand there at the bottom it makes me feel so small, I like to stand there and just think about how I am just a little part of this world. We walked into 101 and looked at all of the different stores as we took the escalators up to the 5th floor, just as we passed those places and I looked at the stuff they were selling it amazed me that people would go to these type of places and spend so much money on things.
On the 5th floor we got into one line and waited for a little bit and then paid for our tickets ($400NT!) and then were lucky enough to get into another line (yes catch the sarcasm there ;D) and had to wait for like 30 minutes, it was incredible how many people were there waiting to just go up the elevator and look out into Taipei. The elevator was insane, we walked in and in 39 seconds we had gone up 82 flights (that would be 373 meters per minute for those who can’t figure that out—it’s ok I wouldn’t be able to figure it out either). It felt like we were going really fast but it is crazy that we were going that fast. When we stepped out of the elevator it amazed me how many people there were walking around looking out the windows at the beautiful view. We walked over to this line where we could get headphones that would give us information about the area and the things that we were seeing. It was really funny, this lady came up to us and took our tickets and told us to walk this way, we walked like 3 feet and then she told us to stop and handed back our tickets to us and grabbed the headphones. She then asked us to walk with her a little ways, where she put the headphones on our ears for us (:D) and explained to us how the headphones worked.
I couldn’t wait to walk away and to look out the enormous windows and to see the view. The view was amazing; I can’t even begin to explain how wonderful it was. We were so lucky while we were up there, just as we got up there an amazing rainbow came out. It started at one end of the valley and slowly worked its way across until you could see it from anywhere in the building. I got some cool pictures, but again it can’t even begin to do it justice. One cool thing that we got to do while we were up there was send a postcard from the highest mailbox in the world. I sent a postcard and took a picture of it, it was kind of funny though because they had 3 different mailboxes, one for family, one for friends, and one for lovers…I understand the family and friends but was not too excited about the lover one.
I thought that the view from 101 was amazing, but am not quite sure that it was worth $400NT- and it blows my mind how many people pay that price every day. I am glad that I did it, but can see why a lot of locals have never gone.
When we were done with 101 we caught the train and then the MRT to the Shillin (when they first told us the name of this market Natalie thought that they said the Silly market- and she was like if it’s silly why would we want to go there…so now it is our inside thing that we call it the silly market) Market, our first stop at the Shillin Market was the food part, we were lucky and found a table (the market was insane and full of people), Natalie and I sat down and waited while they left and grabbed different types of food and then brought them all back for us to try. They brought back coffin bread- a little different than the ones that we have here in Hualien, it was good I definitely liked the stuff from here better; a noodle soup- by the time we got to that I was way too full; stinky tofu- it wasn’t as bad as I thought that it was going to be, of course I don’t think that it was as bad as it could be; we also got some fruit juice mixed with ice- I got watermelon, it wasn’t my favorite.
Max’s friend was pretty tired and so when we were done with dinner they pointed the way towards shopping and then left. Before we started shopping we stopped to try a dessert, it was yummy strawberries on a stick with some kind of red glaze- DELICIOUS! They also had tomatoes but as you can imagine that didn’t exactly jump at me ;D. When we had finished our dessert we started shopping! The first place we went to had all of these cute necklaces and bracelets and different hair clips for only $49NT, both Natalie and I stocked up with tons of stuff. The food and the shopping areas are about a block apart from each other, so Natalie and I headed over to the shopping part. There were SO MANY people, I could barely move. We were probably there for 2-3 hours and we didn’t even begin to see a portion of all the different places there were- I got a cute purse, some name stickers, and some cool Christmas presents—sorry can’t go into too much detail :D. Probably one of the funniest parts of that night was while we were waiting for our name tags to be finished we were walking around and I saw a place that sold what I thought was lemonade. I went over and ordered some, when I got it I took the largest drink ever, BIG MISTAKE! It wasn’t lemonade- it was limeade and I am pretty sure that they put hardly any sugar in it because it was the sourest thing that I have ever tasted. Natalie looked at my face and it was kind of funny- I always wish that someone could be there to take pictures of moments like that so that I could see truly how my face looks. It was getting pretty late and so we decided that we were done shopping for the night and that we would head home. When we got home we both showered and then fell into our beds again exhausted. Though I was going to bed exhausted it was a good kind of exhausted.
Saturday morning Natalie and I both woke up again later and we found that we were the only ones in the apartment. We knew that Christina wouldn’t be there as she was going to head up north to visit the hot springs and her mom, but we were surprised that Tony wasn’t there. We got ready and decided that we would head out on our adventures, we walked down to the bus stop and sat down to wait until the bus came. Finally after waiting for about 20 minutes the bus showed up. We got on and sat down, our plan was to go to the zoo and Christina told us that the bus would take us there, but when it went in the completely opposite direction of the zoo we began to wonder. We weren’t too worried as we knew that eventually it would come back to at least the apartment and we would be fine. When we had been on the bus for like 30 minutes and we came back to the apartment we decided that we would still stay on the bus and see what would happen next…instead of turning of turning left like the bus did the 1st time it turned right, we were definitely intrigued and glad that we had decided to stay on the bus rather then getting off. Our waiting paid off, nearly 50 minutes after we had gotten on the bus we showed up at the zoo. By this time Natalie and I were really hungry (we hadn’t had breakfast yet) and so we headed over to McDonalds to get some lunch.
Lunch was yummy…though I am getting a little tired of McDonald’s food; I hope that I won’t eat there as much as I have been for the past few weeks for the rest of the time. We had read a little bit about a museum, Museum of World Religions; we were kind of excited about going there and interested to see what they would have. It took us a little bit of searching to be able to find the museum, luckily there was a nice lady that stopped on the street and helped us find the place—Natalie and I have decided that if you look lost enough on the sidewalk people will just stop and try and help you, even if they don’t know enough English to be able to really communicate with you.
The museum was pretty cool; they covered a lot of different religions and had different stuff that was a important part of that religion. We easily were at the museum for 2 hours and we could have spent even more time there. I was really impressed with everything that they had in the museum. As we were getting ready to finish the museum Christina called and said that she was going to come pick us up at the museum. We somehow went out the back door but we found her eventually. She took us to this cool house that used to belong to a rich family, it had so many rooms and it was really easy to get lost in- sadly both Natalie’s and my batteries died on our cameras so we didn’t get any pictures of the place. When we were done there we tried going to this other place where they have the changing of the guards but it had closed like 5 minutes before we got there.
By this time Natalie and I were pretty hungry and so we asked Christina if she could maybe take us somewhere to eat food, she suggested taking us to an Italian restaurant, she said that she wouldn’t be eating though as she had just finished a 7 course meal with her family and she was still full. We got into the end of the line of about 50 people; Christina started talking with these sisters that were in front of us. Pretty soon it was decided that we would be eating with the sisters and the rest of their family who showed up soon and Christina would explore around the stores in the block. The family was really nice that we were eating with, one of the daughters and the son speak English so it was a fun dinner. We were about half way through our meal when Nana (the girl that spoke English) told us that her parents wanted to pay for our dinner. We tried insisting that they didn’t even know us and that we should pay for our own food, but they kept on insisting that they were Taiwanese, they are kind people and that we were their guests. They ended up paying for us, even after we insisted a dozen or more times that they shouldn’t. My food was delicious, it was pasta with some kind of cream sauce and bacon and spinach, YUMMY!
When we were done with dinner we called Christina came and found us and we headed off to a library. I found a cute fun book that I bought and when we were done with that we went and did some shopping downtown. Christina was crazy; she was everywhere grabbing stuff and throwing other things away. I am pretty sure that she bought more than Natalie and I put together. We were getting pretty tired when we realized that we should probably get some food for Sunday, Tony doesn’t like bread and so Christina likes to eat it when she is not with him, so she asked if we could just get a ton of bread- of course we love bread and so we agreed with her. We went to this bakery that was absolutely amazing, they had these really yummy muffins and these rolls that were blueberry and cheese flavor (I know sounds kind of weird but they were delicious flavors together). Again we went home and went to sleep.
Sunday morning I knew that Nathan and Sallee would be landing and so when Christina got a call early in the morning I sat right up hoping that it would be them. After that I wasn’t able to really go to sleep because I was too excited, of course because I was waiting for their phone call it seemed that Christina was getting tons of phone calls that weren’t Nathan and Sallee. Finally they did call and I was told that they would soon come!!!! I decided that I would stay and wait for them to get to the apartment and that Christina and Natalie would go and watch Conference. Probably barely 10 minutes after they had left Nathan and Sallee showed up. We hung around for a little while, let them stretch out and relax and then we decided to head out. We walked down the hill and caught the bus to the zoo. We were hungry, and so we found something to eat. There is a gondola that is supposed to be really cool to ride to the top of this hill but it is closed right now, we were sad but we waited for a bus and went to the top. We walked around for awhile, looking at different temples-a lot of steps!
We were supposed to be meeting Christina and Natalie at the apartment and so we headed back towards the apartment, we caught a bus that went part way down and then we walked the rest of the way. They were already there waiting for us, as soon as we walked in the door they were ready to go, we took time to use the bathroom and then we headed out again- but this time by car. We went to this place where there was the changing of the guard- it was pretty cool, how in sync they were. It was kind of funny to see some of the guards where were not on duty- they had these major tan lines of where they have the straps of their hats normally. When we got home we had a little while to putter around but then Natalie and I needed to pack up to head home.
We were hoping that Natalie and I would be able to get an earlier train, we did get one that was supposed to leave earlier but then it kept getting on delayed. We didn’t end up leaving until after 10pm! When we got home we were both very tired, which is good considering that it was nearly 2am in the morning. We figured that we were lucky to still have gotten the earlier train because all of them were most likely delayed because of it being National Holiday weekend and so we were glad that we got earlier because it probably would have been closer to 3 otherwise.