Taipei

Oh gracious. So, we all know that Nancy and I went to bed late on Friday. Well, we set our alarms to go off at 4:45am so that we would have time to eat and get ready to leave and we were going to leave for the train station at 5:30am to give us enough time to get there, because it's better to be safe then sorry. Well... neither one of us woke up to our alarms. I rolled over and was surprised that my alarm hadn't gone off yet so I checked my phone. 5:29am. I got up, saw that Nancy wasn't up and knocked on her door, said, hey Nancy, it's 5:30am, and walked into the bathroom to put in my contacts. I hear her leap out of bed and start throwing on clothes (remember, we were planning on leaving at 5:30, not waking up). But don't you worry, we were up, packed, and on our bikes by 5:37am. Is that some pro status or what? We hauled a** to the train station and made it there 20 minutes before our train left. This is us in the train station. Can you tell that we JUST woke up?

Anyway, we made it to the train in time and we slept a little bit on the two hour train ride, but mostly we talked, or Nancy would sleep while I looked out the window. I'm not big on sleeping in public places. The first place we went was to the Taipei Temple to do baptisms. It's crazy how small the temple is. I knew that they made mini temples, but I hadn't experienced one before. Well, we got there around 9am, and baptismal sessoins don't start until 10am so we spent a long time waiting in some chairs at the entrance of the temple. It turned out nicely though, because there is an English ward in Taipei and it was there day to do youth baptisms, so there were a lot of white people in the temple. It was nice.

So, I think these two are my favorite pictures of the temple, but it's really hard to get a good picture because you need to back away from it, but the temple grounds aren't very big and the temple is surrounded by stores and restraunts so I did the best with what room I had available.

After baptisms we went across the street to a "spaghetti place." Well, that's what Nancy called it, but it was really just a place that had fried noodles and no marinara sauce, so pretty much Nancy is crazy and should have said, let's get some fried noodles from this place, all the members tell me it's good.

After lunch we started our sight seeing adventures. I honestly don't know how Nancy survived 3 days in Taipei by herself. She's got a terrible sense of direction and doesn't pay attention to where she's going. She just started walking off in one direction and I thought she was showing me the hostel she'd stayed at. It turns out that she was trying to get back to the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit- like a subway) station. She finally asked me if we were headed the right way and I told her no. Instead of walking back the exact way we had just come I told her to turn down the street and we would walk around the block. We started walking that way and she started to question if we were really headed in the right direction. Her doubting then started to worry me, but we kept walking and it turns out that I was absolutely right and we walked right into the station.

Well, we didn't walk into the station because we wanted to look at the outside of the Chaing Kai-shek Memorial. Nancy had already seen it and it takes a long time, so we just looked at the outside and moved on.

There was some kind of festival thing going on and it was funny because there were military men out in the court and they were doing a gun spinning routine to music. You know, like the flag team does in high school? But this was a little cooler.

Ah, I'm loading pictures as I go and it's taking forever. So, if I stop doing pictures for everything I'll let you know if it's because I don't have pictures or if I'm just being lazy :o)

Okay, what else did we do? I think the next thing we did was to take the MRT (that's what we rode all say, so now when I say we went to, know we went to it on the MRT) to the Confusious and Baoan Temples. They are supposed to be in complete contrast to each other. The Baoan is elaborate, bright, and colorful, while the Confusious Temple is simple Bamboo with detailed carvings and architechture, but not colorful. So, we went to the Baoan Temple and it was a lot like all the other temples we visited in this area.

And we were searching and searching for the Confucious temple but we couldn't find it. Finally we realized that the arch way with the locked gate and the sign on it was the gate way to the temple and the sign said it was closed for repairs. Dang it, the one temple that would have looked different then all the rest (well, minus the mormon temple) and it's closed. And it will be closed until August 31st so I can't even see it when I go back to Taipei later. (I plan on going back to Taipei either when Natallie comes or by myself because there is so much that I still haven't seen.)

And at the Baoan Temple is where we met our first creeper of the day. Because there were a lot of white people in Taipei, we weren't that exciting to the people passing us. But, at the Baoan Temple, this old man with terrible teeth came up and tried to say something to us. Nancy said that he said something about eating food. I told him I didn't understand him "Wo ting bu dong" and he smalled and walked on. But he kept on reappearing everywhere. I would look up to take a picture and when I took the camera away from my eye he'd be standing behind me. Or, he would walk on ahead when I waved my hand and said "bu yao" (don't want) when he kept trying to talk to me. But, everytime he went on ahead, he would some how reappear behind us or right next to us. The worst was when we left to go find the Confucious temple and he rides up on his bike and motions for us to get on. I tell him "bu yao, xie xie" (don't want, thank you) and so he pulls out a cigarette and hands it to me. "bu yao" Then I say "bye-bye" and start walking, but he talks to Nancy so that she can't get away. Weird creeper. He finally left us for good after that.

The next stop was to visit the 2-28 Memorial.

On Februray 28th, 1947 there was an uprising again the Chinese powers in Taiwan and there was a massive slaughter of the Taiwanese people. We checked out the Memorial and then went to look at the Memorial Museum. The museum was full of pictures and drawings of the people in Taiwan and a little background information about why the uprising happened. But, it was pretty boring. We had headphones to do a self guided tour in English, but it was like listenting to a history lecture whil flipping through textbook pictures, except the pictures weren't in a book, they were hanging on a wall. Plus it took forever and I was feelig nautious, so I probably could have appreciated it more if it was shorter and I didn't feel like fainting.

I think we went to Taipei 101 next. It's the tallest builing in the world. You have to pay to go up to the top. And, Nancy was explaining it to me becasuse she wasn't going to go up, she's already done it and didn't want to pay for it again. You go up an elevator to the 98th floor, and you can look out the windows there, but then you go outside onto a balcony and there's a ladder or somthing that you climb to go up to the 101st floor. I went up to the ticket counter to ask if the we could go up to the roof and it had started raining, so I couldn't. I didn't want to pay to only go up to the 98th floor, so I went back down and decided to hit it up on my next trip. Unfortunately because it was raining and we had to run to catch the free shuttle that took us back to the MRT station, I didn't take any pictures of Taipei 101. Which, now that I realize it, is pretty lame, but I can't do anything about it now.

Our next stop was the Longshan which is one of the oldest in Taiwan. It looked pretty much the same as all the other temples. But, it's still amazing. There is so much detail in every little part. Plus, because it was getting later, there were more people there praying, so that was kind of cool, but also a little awkward. I know they're used to it, but I'm an awkward person, so I didn't want to stay too long.

Okay, I'm all out of pictures now because at the Temple my camera started to act up, and then we were trying to rush the rest of our trip so even if my camera had worked, I don't think I would have stopped to take more pictures.

After walking around the Longshan Temple and snapping a few pictures, we went across the street to the Huasi Night Market, which used to be a totally shady snake market, full of prostitutes and drug smugglers, but they cleaned it up and now it's just a tourist market. I think we went too early, because it wasn't really that exciting, and no one was playing with snakes. But, I did get a souvenir from there. There was a paper fan shop and so I walked past and said "duoshao qian" (how much is this). The guy told me "liang ge pi kui" (200 NT$). That's only like $6 and they were really pretty so I decided to go on ahead. I was looking at which one I wanted, and the guy said that he could write our name on the fan for us and he started pulling out for me to look at. I picked on I really liked and he asked my name, and based on sound, he wrote out the chinese characters for my name, and I chose another character for him to write (intelligence), then he wrote 2008 in Taipei and signed it (all of this is written in Chinese of course). When Nancy saw him writing mine, she really started wanting one. She looked at one that had a dragon on it and she thought that it might be more expensive and so she asked "doushao qian" and he told her "the same" and pointed to mine. I now know why he said "the same." This guy was super tricky. When he had finished writing our names (so it's too late to turn back now, it's written on) he tells us "300, and 300 hundred" funny that he knows enough English to say 300 now, but in the beginning it was "liang ge pi" I whispered to Nancy, he said 200 earlier. But he heard and said, 200 for print (pointing to the ones on the table outside), 300 for painted (the ones he showed us were hand painted). So, we had to pay 300 (still not that bad to pay $9 for a hand painted souvenior) instead of 200. We walked away laughing at how tricky that guy was. Nancy was especially impressed once she realized that he said "the same" when she asked how much hers was. I also walked past a shoe store that had a sign out saying that shoes were 95 NT$ (around $3) and so I stopped and looked. They had a bunch of cute shoes and I bought some pretty rockin' yellow stripped shoes. I would have taken a picture of them, but my camera's not working, remember. Just know that they're pretty trendy looking, and I'm so excited to pretend that I can pull off the trendy look.

Next was the Guanghua Market that is the technology market where we were supposed to buy a camera for super cheap. First of all, it took us forever to find it because my book just told us what exit to take off the MRT and her book didn't say anything about it. We wandered for a while but finally found it. This area is most famous for their laptops, but there were plenty of cell phone places, and a few camera places. We went in and asked for the camera we wanted but it turned out to be even more expensive then the stores in Hualien. We found a different camera store and tried again. The guy told us a price that is more or less equivalent to $500 American money. We told him no and he asked what we wanted to pay for it. We told him online we could get it for $350 American dollars and on the calculator we did the convertion. He looked at it like we were crazy. He did the conversion himself and got an even lower number and he just shook his head and told us he was sorry and couldn't go that low. Actually, he just shook his head with a sorry look on his face and we knew that's what he meant. So, no camera. What a bummer. I think I've pretty much decided not to buy the camera I really want (the one that's cheaper online then anywhere in Taiwan), but that I'll just go to the camera store in Hualien and find a small, cheap camera. Most of the other digital cameras are a pretty good price, but the one I wanted was water proof, shock proof, and pretty much indestructable. But actually getting it would be a hastle if I ordered it online, so I'll just go with a cute, colorful, small one.

The last stop was the Shihlin Night Market which is supposed to be the biggest night market in Taipei. It was like 8:30pm and we hadn't had dinner yet because we knew that was the place to get it. We walked all around (it was pretty big, but everyone was so close together that it didn't take that long) and decided to grab fried chicken (it had the longest line, therefore it must have been the best) and some ice cream. This wasn't real ice cream, it was more icy then creamy, but it good and nothing like that nasty shaved ice crap I ate the first weekend I was here. We had to scarf down our chicken and I didn't even finish my ice cream before we had to sprint to the MRT and then sprint to catch our train. I also bought a cute black necklace at one of the stores. Usually I'm a pretty indecisive shopper, but because we didn't have much time, I showed Nancy that I liked the necklace and she said "good, get it" and so I did. Good thing she was there.

I did better at sleeping on the 3 hour train ride back, but I was still up for most of it. I was paraoid about missing the stop that when we still had an hour left, I tried to go to sleep, but only slept 20 minutes. But it sucked because Nancy was out so I had to sit there queitly, being tired, but being unable ot sleep.

The train got us back to Hualien at 12:46am, and then we rode back to the apartment. We were so beat. Nancy's crazy and stayed online until 3 am, but I crashed and went to bed.