Around the world in 108 days
We're flying to Beijing, China tomorrow. I'm not sure if I'll have wifi access there so posts will probably be less frequent.
Today we met up with Yanmei's friend Amanda again. She has been a great host to us here in Taipei. As you can see I got a new hat. We happened to see a Roots store here, so I picked up that hat. It is an interim hat until I find a good one with a full brim.
-David
Unfortunately that is probably the last picture of me in my hat. I mistakenly left it on the train when I got off at Taipei 🙁 . My new Tilley hat that I bought for this trip didn't even last through the first month.
Anyway that was Friday, and we got settled into our new place in Taipei. It has a small stove so Yanmei can finally cook. She misses cooking her own food.
Saturday we decided to mostly rest, not be too busy. However Saturday morning we went out to the local morning market to get some stuff for Yanmei to cook. She told me to stay back because she thought she wouldn't get good deals if she was with a foreigner. So I decided to just look around the market myself, maybe I could find a new hat, and it shouldn't be too difficult to find her again. Not a good idea. After a few minutes I went back to find her and I couldn't. I circled the whole market with no luck, then realized that wasn't the whole market, there were other little alleys leading off here and there with more stalls. I circled a couple more times and finally saw her walk across the other end of an alley, so I caught back up to her. Didn't end up finding a hat.
So we mostly rested Saturday. I followed the Raptors losing game 3, we're 12 hours ahead here so Saturday morning I can follow the Friday night games. Although we were resting we'd recently heard it was firefly season, which is late April-early May. I wanted to go see them, because if we ever come back to Taiwan it will be in the cool season, like October or November. It's not even the hot season yet, but it is still hot and humid most days.
Anyway Saturday evening we went to see the fireflies. The small mountain behind the pedestrian suspension bridge is where the fireflies are.
Unfortunately, because the weather was good and it was Saturday, it was extremely crowded, and thousands of people trying to go up and down a narrow mountain trail doesn't work very well. It actually felt pretty dangerous in spots because there was no railing, and if someone tripped in the dark they could easily push you off the edge.
We saw quite a few fireflies. I was hoping to see a giant cloud of them, and maybe that existed, but the line basically ground to a halt so we turned back. Fireflies don't photograph well, and my pictures turned out worse than I hoped, I need more practice with my camera in low light situations.
We also got to see some nice night Taipei skyline views.
-David
We're in Tainan now and it is raining out, so I'm trying to catch up on the blog.
So Sunday April 19th, we got a bit of a late start. First we tried to go to a local buffet we went to on the first day, but it was closed. We decided to go to the National Palace Museum which was close to where we lived. Although it was hot and humid we decided to walk, thinking that we could find a place to eat along the way. It was a 30 minute walk and nothing was open except the 7-Elevens. Although it is interesting to walk through a foreign city, given the heat, maybe not a good idea.
The National Palace Museum is Taiwan's equivalent of the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Many of the artifacts are from Beijing and were evacuated to Taiwan when Japan invaded prior to WW2.
After the museum we took a bus to Taipei Main Station, which is the rail station. Yanmei wanted to check it out and buy tickets for the next day. We got there and it seemed very easy to buy tickets through the automatic ticket machines and the trains seemed to leave every 15 minutes so we decided we didn't need to buy ahead of time.
I still wanted to go to Taipei 101, but we looked around at the shops near the station for a while, but many were closed, I guess because it was Sunday. Then it started to rain heavily. We went into a 7-Eleven and bought an umbrella for $2. Due to the rain we gave up on Taipei 101 and went back to our room.
-David
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