Taiwan-Part 1

Howdy all!


So, rather than spending the study week doing the obvious and cliche thing-studying-a friend and I chose to go to Taiwan for a few days instead. And, I've come to two conclusions: 1) Taiwan is definitely my cup of tea, and 2) Metaphors about tea are appropriate for describing Taiwan.

The first day we arrived at the airport at 1 AM. This meant we pretty much just went right into the hostel and went to sleep. Luckily, the cab driver coming into the city (Taipei), gave us lots of good tips on what to see/do/eat. The next day we headed straight out to the nightmarket near by, where we grabbed some noodles for breakfast. We headed straight off to the MRT towards some of the city's monuments. The MRT is above-ground in Taipei. We noticed there that everything moved at a slower pace in Taipei, especially some of the escalators in the MRT!

The first monument we arrived at was the Sun Yat Sen memorial hall. Sun Yat Sen was a leader in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in the early 1900's (he actually studied at HKU). His memorial was large, but most of the museum was only in Chinese, so I had trouble reading it.There was, however, a giant statue of him, with guards on either side. The crazy thing about these guards was that they were so still, not even blinking, that we thought they were statues. Eventually, a changing of the guard was done; this was a lengthy drill which took probably 20 minutes, was full of show-offy actions that served no real purpose, and wreaked havoc on the floor tiles (they banged their guns on the ground alot).

Our next destination was the 2nd largest tower in the world-Taipei 101! Before heading up the tower, we headed into the foodcourt in its basement for a famous Taiwanese product-bubble tea! That's right, bubble tea (which, if you haven't had it, is this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_tea) originated in Taipei, and the stuff we had there did not dissapoint (it's about as common in Taipei as Tim Hortons in Canada or Starbucks in the US and Vancouver, and we had atleast one per day). Then, we went up to the top of the tower. As my friend pointed out, it was a typical East-Asian city, and the smog filled the air. It's also interesting to note that, although Taipei 101 is the second tallest building in the world, it's pretty much the only tall building in the city. They've also made a cute cartoon character out of the wind damper, which was drawn everywhere. The top of the place also had a frighteningly expensive coral shop (as in, they could have used scientific notation for their prices).

We followed Taipei 101 up with a trip to Longshan temple. First, we grabbed some noodles (wonton noodles), and then headed to the temple. The square infront of the temple seemed to be where all of the senior citizens in Taipei spend their time. The temple itself was also packed with people (for the record, the temples in Taipei were the first I'd ever seen with digital displays in front).

Next we headed to the memorial for Chiang Kai Shek. A nice building, it was similar to the other memorial in that it had the soldiers (we found out that these were actual soldiers-Taiwan has mandatory military service for males for one year).

After visiting another temple, we headed to one of the best parts of Taiwan-the Shilin night market. Taipei seems dead during the day, but it comes alive at night, with food, shops (which blast pop music to create a cool atmosphere), and people, and it's alot of fun. After dining on a variety of things, we headed back for the night