Hello!
Matt and I decided that we had to go to the Taipei International Flora Exposition, even if we couldnt get a day off so that we could go during the week when it wasnt so busy. When Mom and Pat visited, we had seen that on weekends it was getting about 55,000 or 60,000 visitors a day. On the weekdays it was more like 30,000 or 35,000. Obviously we would have preferred a weekday, but it ended on Monday, so we didnt have a choice. Unfortunately, it seems like everybody else had put off it off until the last minute as well. It was beyond anything I had imagined. I was thinking that since it was the last weekend maybe it would get 80,000 people. Boy, was I wrong! 184,000 people were there on Sunday!!! It was ridiculous. It was very pretty, but we just couldnt handle the crowd. It was a very hot day, and there were long lines to even get to vending machines. Some people were being very rude, which is quite uncharacteristic here. We had a really hard time getting pictures, which is why there aren't many pictures with Matt or I in them. It just took too long, and it seemed very rude to make a line of 200 people wanting to walk a path wait while you used the whole thing. This is what was really bothering me about others, they would want to take pictures from five or six different angles, and would take up four of the five feet of walkway! I understand you want one picture, but they were a little ridiculous. There was one lady who would do this, and then she would elbow her way through the crowd till there was another photo opportunity, then hold up the crowd again! Well, we did enjoy it a lot. It was very beautiful, but we didnt explore very much. Two hours was more than enough time spent there.
We did a lot of other fun stuff as well. Before we even went to the flower expo, Matt and I decided to go to the Grand Hotel. It is a beautiful place, done in some sort of traditional Chinese architecture. It is absolutely huge! It would be very weird indeed to stay in a hotel that is a tourist attraction in its own right. There is a lot of security, plus tour buses coming and going every which direction. Its up on a hill, with gorgeous green mountains behind it. It overlooks a beautiful river, not quite sure but I think its the Keelung River. There is a lot of interesting looking hiking trails behind it, but we had enough planned for the day, plus it was a scorcher. From Grand Hotel, we walked to Martyrs' Shrine. It is very beautiful, and again with the beautiful back drop of the green mountains. Most people come primarily for the changing of the guards. In fact, we caught a bit of the changing of the guard as we arrived. Its cool, but I dont find changing of the guards that great just because of how closely people jam in to watch. I couldnt get a decent picture anyways. I have to stand on my tippy-toes to see anything over all the cameras, and in the Taiwanese heat, umbrellas. People here carry umbrellas for two reasons as far as I can tell. I cant tell which is the higher priority, but they want to keep there skin light, suntans are very unpopular, and it provides a constant source of shade, which makes it marginally cooler. Anyways, back to the changing of the guard. Because it has been going on for so many years, there are three lines worn into the tiles from the temple to the gate. Most people dont even bother going to the temple, they just watch the change and then head out, so the rest was relatively quiet. It was nice and peaceful, plus they had very good English translations of the paintings and statues. Its just a very beautiful shrine, and we appreciated how quiet it was, especially in comparison to going to Chiang-Kai Shek or 2-28 Peace Park on a weekend.
Later in the day we headed to one of our favorite districts in town, Ximen (pronounced she-men). Its the young, hip shopping district in town. It has many trendy shops, tattoo parlors, interesting restaurants, and street performers. We saw one man in clown paint dancing around to Lady Gaga and such. He was quite good, if you can get past his questionable taste in music and choice of the clown costume. Ximen is also the home to the famous Modern Toilet restaurant. For anybody who has seen 10 Craziest Themed Restaurants around the globe, or something of the sort, you have heard of it. It is the restaurant where everything is bathroom themed. You sit on toilets, your drinks get served out of urinals (anyone want some lemonade or green tea?), beware of ordering the chocolate ice-cream because you know what it will look like, and any other immature potty joke you can think of, comes to life here! We chose not to eat there this time, as one of our favorite things about coming to Taipei is having good food, not food thats hard to choke down. Anyways, we spent quite a long time exploring Ximen, but it was convenient as thats the district we were staying in. We will always stay here if we can, because its super close to the MRT and just so much fun. We went to Shilin Night Market briefly but they were busy plus our favorite building is shut down right now. Hopefully, they are just remodeling and then they will get it back up and running. Basically, we had no real meals all day long, just munched food as it appealed to us. We had a really good halal sandwich, chicken coffin bread, papaya milk, apple milk, and then we felt like indulging in American food and went to TGI Fridays to get Buffalo Wings and Quesadillas. We love papaya milk, we get it every week at our night market, but the apple milk was not so good. Try putting milk, freshly sliced apples, and ice into a blender and you will discover that the texture of apples just is not that appealing once you have had most of the ice and milk. It is just way too pulpy.
Anyways, that is it for now. Back to life as usual until we can do another mini-vacation! I hope you all had a very happy Easter!
PS. If you are ever wondering what the pictures are, you can just click on them and I write little comments under most about where the picture is from or what it specifically is. It just takes you to Picasa Web Albums and then you can view the pictures individually and full size. Love you all!
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