Taiwan!

Music: Love Story- Taylor Swift
Mood: Shopping, Eating, Exploring

This is my second post from outside of Hong Kong! I'm live from Taipei, Taiwan. Being here since Thursday night, I've really enjoyed my time here in Taipei. It's such a cool city, with so much to do. It's bigger (and more spread out than Hong Kong). The MRT (Metropolitan Rapid Transit) compared to Hong Kong's (MTR, Mass Transit Railway) is not as clean as Hong Kong and reminds me of the Korean's subway. The same person had to have designed both systems. They also have the equivalent of a Hong Kong octopus card (called the Easy pass), but you can only use it on the MRT or the bus. In Hong Kong, we can use the Octopus card on practically anything (like at 7-11 or at McDonalds or the grocery store)-- it's sort of a like Bevo Bucks.

So on Thursday, our flight landed around 10, and we got to our hostel around 11 and finally settled in around 12 or 1. We woke up Friday morning, went to the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall, saw a changing of the guards and went on a random tour of the place. After that, we went to Taipei 101 to explore and eat at the food courts. Then, the girls I traveled with wanted to go to another, more affordable mall, so we went to the Pacific Core, Living Room. I'm not much of a mall person when I travel, but this was like a 11 storey mall and the best thing was the kids section on the 5th floor. There were these animals that you could literally ride around the mall. It was AMAZING!. Then after that mall, we went to Longshan temple (which was built in like the 18th century.) It was cool to see the people all chanting and worshipping. It was by far the busiest/most packed temple I've visited in all of Asia. After the temple, we went to Ximending shopping area where most youth culture hang out. It was a really cool array of shops and street food vendors! After that, we went to Snake Alley Night Market (Huaxi Market). There wasn't much to that market except the snakes in the resturants that people eat for soup. After that, we met up with a friend of a friend we know at HKUST and went out to experience Taiwan night life.

On Saturday, we got up and had breakfast at this authentic taiwan dumpling shop that the hostel owner recommended to us. I had a rice roll (there was shredded pork and some other thing in it, and I also had Shuijian Bao! We caught a bus to Yingmanshan National Park, were three of us decided to hike up Cicsing Moutain (elevation, 1120M). The other two in our group decided that the hike was not for them so they would meet us at the other side while chilling at the hot springs. It took us about 3 hours to climb the moutain-- we calculated that the angle was 21.8 degrees (as according to the signage we came across, we had 200M to go up, and 500M of walking left before we hit the top: so arctan of 2/5 is 21.8). Haha ok. Random.

Well, I have to go pack and enjoy the rest of my day. We leave Taipei around 7pm so I'll update on what else we did on Saturday, Sunday, and then today!