Taipei: land of the big dome ... and the big Santa

Well, we took a trip to Taipei over the weekend - a 4 hour bus ride from Sinying (we'll just say it wasn't excessively comfortable). Luckily, Jake is a highly intelligent individual and bought us a Taipei map beforehand, because Taipei is huge.

I lost count of how many Westerners we saw in the city. In order to understand the amazingness of that, you have to realize that we've been living in Yanshuei for the past 3 months where only a few foreigners reside. So, seeing someone who isn't Taiwanese is extremely rare for us - and, furthermore, having a fluent English conversation with someone other than eachother is a pretty non-existent possibility.



We stayed at a hotel in the Ximen district of Taipei which was an area with shop on top of shop. During the nighttime, it was completely crammed with people (and was obviously the "happening" place). We spotted a noodle shop that was so busy we couldn't even see the counter - but, there were no places to sit(many of the food places here are more like food stands and not actual restaurants)and so their customers were just standing all over the street sipping from their soup bowls - it was an interesting sight. When we woke up the next morning, however, the streets were almost completely empty (like the above photo) and most of the shops were closed - it was quite a transformation from the bustle of the night before.











(above 5 photos) Ximen at night. I thought the Starbucks on top of the 7-11 was an ineresting combo. By the way, Taiwan is overrun with 7-11 stores and I'm not sure what the obsession is - but they're good for 2 a.m. snacks.





(above) You can see the Taipei 101 building on the right.

















It was a bit tricky finding our hotel - we ended up getting directions from a few police officers who were roaming the streets. As it turns out, our hotel occupied the 7th, 8th and 9th floor of a building - meaning that it was hard to spot from the street - especially since the ground floor level was a massage parlor (above).



This was easily the most awesome Starbucks I've ever been to (above) because it was 4 stories. Brilliant.




Kaohsiung has Dream Mall and Taipei has Living Mall (above is the dome side entrance).







An escalator connecting the dome building to the other building inside the mall (above).



Now that's a cool elevator.





Though the mall had very interesting and intricate architecture, it really wasn't that great for shopping. In all, we preferred Dream Mall (see last post).



(above) A really big Santa in the mall.







(above) The mall food court.


That's all for this post. Until next time.