Taipei

We woke up on New Year's Day in Taipei and on our own.  We no longer had the language skills of fluent family members to rely on but, having gone on a few trips without Chad & May, we were confident of our ability to survive.  However, we had no idea that Taipei would hate us and try it's hardest to prevent us from enjoying ourselves.  Taipei is a hateful city.

We started out slowly, heading north on the subway to the Taipei Arts Park.  Unfortunately, when we got off the subway we quickly noticed that the entire area was under construction for the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo.  We weaved our way through the temporary pedestrian pathways, hoping to eventually be lead into a gorgeous art park but it never happened. We wandered around for almost two hours through horrible construction, never finding anything resembling a peaceful, beautiful art park. 

We hopped back onto the subway and headed to Ximending, a district in Taipei where all the hip kids hangout.  It was like being in a giant, outdoor, street market version of Forever 21.  Being surrounded by a bunch of "hip kids" was not as diverting as we had hoped. 

After another disappointing couple of hours, we headed to the famous Shilin Night Market.  Surely this would prove amazing and exponentially better than anything we experienced at the Kaohsiung night markets.  Unfortunately, again we were disappointed.  The Shilin Night Market was a horribly crowded tourist trap.  We doubt there was one local person in the entire place besides the venders who, by the way, were not very friendly nor patient and nowhere near as accommodating as their counterparts in Kaohsiung.  After stumbling around for another couple of hours, we decided to call it a night and attack Taipei from a different angle the next day.

The next day we headed to Taipei 101 (again).  This time we would be going up to the observation deck.

The view from the top was pretty cool, but we felt as though we had seen it already.  Plus, and we had been warned about this when we purchased the tickets for the observation deck, the visibility was poor, so our view wasn't as good as it could've been.  However, it was cool that we were at the top of the tallest building in the world, when it was still the tallest building in the world (the new tallest building in the world, located in Dubai, wouldn't open until January 4th).  Additionally, we rode in the world's fastest elevator and saw the world's largest tuned mass damper (pictured below).

The visit to Taipei 101 wasn't terrible, so our second day in Taipei was already shaping up to be better than our first.  But, lest we believe Taipei was beginning to like us, we next headed east on the subway towards Maokong, a tea growing village in the southeastern hills of Taipei.  After riding the subway east to it's last station we still needed to take a gondola ride up a mountain to get to the remote village.  Desi was so excited for this experience.  She loves gondolas used as public transportation.  We had hoped to spend the whole day hiking and exploring the area and, of course, enjoying tea but, unfortunately, when we got to the gondola we were met with the unhappy, yet not entirely unexpected, news of it's closure due to system inspection.  We're not sure if this was due to the earthquake we experienced a couple weeks earlier or whether something else had happened but, either way, the gondola was closed and the only other way to Maokong, according to a security guard at the gondola station, was via a complicated bus itinerary we weren't mentally prepared to tackle.

Desi was devastated.  All the frustrations from the past couple days had taken their toll on her.  Desi was ready to throw in the towel and just hide in the hotel room until the morning, when we would be leaving for Hong Kong.  But, since it was still relatively early in the day, we decided that we should head back to our hotel, but only to regroup and redesign our day.  Since it was our last day in Taipei, and in Taiwan, Mike convinced Desi not to give up.  So, Desi got the guidebook out and began to quickly look for recommended activities.  We decided we wanted to experience another night market.  Desi came across the description for Shida Night Market, located in an area of Taipei we hadn't yet been to.  So, at the very least we would get to see a new area of Taipei.  We put our game faces back on and headed out.

Shida Night Market was awesome!  By far the best experience we'd had in Taipei yet.  Since it was located near a university campus, Taiwan Normal University, it was stocked with college kids, which is much more preferable than high schoolers, which is what we encountered in Ximending.  Additionally, we found our first stash of bars, which is exactly what Desi needed after the disappointing experience Maokong had turned out to be.  Desi got her drink, and even some decent pomme frites, did some shopping and truly enjoyed herself. 

We think it was actually a good thing the Maokong experience happened the way it did because we would leave Taipei the next morning wanting to come back, and not only to finally experience the gondola ride to Maokong that we were cheated of this time around but to further explore the Shida District, which seemed to be the only part of Taipei that didn't hate us.