Taipei, Taiwan Part 2

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Well, the end of the trip was drawing to a close. Amy and I got back to Taipei in the early evening and found our hostel pretty quickly. We stayed in the Taipei Travelers Hostel. It's on the 22nd floor of the electronics store next to the Mistsukoshi building. The owners were great and very helpful in getting us information and also just having fun conversation. I also discovered that the Travel Channel's 5 Takes: the Pacific Rim show stayed there.

We ended up at the Fine Arts Museum that afternoon. It was really nice! The first floor was an architecture exhibit on future architecture. Many of the designs reminded me of things I saw in Star Wars or other such futuristic movies. I guess I know where they got all their designs from now (the movies, I mean). The second floor was my favorite. It was a huge exhibit on Taiwan. It was set up on the four cardinal directions and there was a mix of medias. My favorite was in different shades of red, black, and gray. It was of a temple, in red, and the black and gray moved around as the smoke from the incense. It was lovely. Since we didn't get to travel as far as we wanted it was really nice to see the country a little differently then anticipated. The third floor was of a modern artist that used mix media; paint, stickers, and gems. All of his paintings were portraits with the people painted in traditional bright face paints. It was a little unusual, the the exhibit was huge and pretty fun to walk around in.

We stayed in that night but made plans to see Bryan the next day. While we were up we heard that there was going to be fireworks to celebrate the start of the month of August. the number 8 is very lucky in many Asian cultures and since the whole month is the 8th month it was more reason to celebrate! We, most of our floor of the hostel, sat in the VIP room and watched the fireworks from out giant window. It was really fun to get to know the other people in our hostel and just relax.

Saturday

We met Bryan and headed out to the Taipei Zoo. It was really hot, but it was cheap to get in, only 60 NTD. THe zoo itself really wasn't all that spectacular in my opinion, but it was a pretty fun way to spend the day and I haven't been to a zoo since I was in middle school. We saw elephants, penguins, pandas, a rather excited zebra, and a lot of birds. It was very entertaining to walk around and enjoy a relative quite afternoon.

The best part of the day was riding the Maokong Gondola. You can start in the Zoo or outside it and it takes up up and along the outer edges of Taipei. It's absolutely fantastic and worth the trip to the zoo. You can see Taipei 101 and all of Taipei. It takes about 20-30 minutes to go from start to finish and it passes the zoo and a couple large temples. When you get to Maokong you can walk along all the teahouses or some restaurants. We walked for a little while and got some great food at a restaurant with an amazing view. Made the whole day worth it.

We were all disgusting after the hot day in the zoo so we split up and got showers and made plans to get back together for a last night out. We ended up at karaoke. We had planed on only an hour but somehow we ended up with an accidental 3 hour karaoke session. The karaoke selection in Taipei for foreign songs is pretty good. A lot of oldies and a great splash of 90's pop. Ahh, good times.

Sunday

Amy and I were out of the hostel and had a quick breakfast in Starbucks before we paid the taxi fare to the airport. There is a bus that goes to the airport, but it took about an hour to get there and we decided to play it safe and just pay the $40 by taxi. We ended up with a taxi driver that spoke English, so we chatted with him the whole way there. He even taught us pineapple cake in Chinese....but I've forgotten it already.

All in all, it was an amazing trip and I had such a great time. I hope to go back and check out more of Taiwan soon.

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