We woke up bright and early the next day to start on another days adventure in TAIWAN! My dad met up with us, and he took us on our first trip on the Taipei Metro! It is such a great system. You buy a card, put money on it, swipe it when you go into the subway station, and when you go out. The further you go, the more you pay. The average amount that we pay per subway ride is about $1 and that gets us pretty far already. There are 6 different subway lines, most of them extending to either the north/south or east/west point of the city, therefore making it so easy to transit around. The subways are clean, fast and nicely air-conditioned. So it's pretty fantastic, and definitely beats the TTC by a billion times. See here for a picture of the Taipei subway transit.
Our next adventure was the Mao Kong Gondola (貓空纜車). One thing that amazed us, first and foremost, was the price of the Gondola. It costs a person, regularly, about 2 dollars CAD to go up the gondola. I am not sure how much the Grouse Gondola is, but I can bet it's at least 5 time the price. So we got our tickets and waiting to go on the special Gondolas, which are called the Crystal Eye Gondolas, because the floor is glass and clear, meaning you can stare straight down and scare the hell out of yourself. It was pretty scary at first for me, but I got used to it. The movement of the gondolas was actually more frightening that the actual height. But I wasn't that scared, and my dad and Jordan were definitely not scared at all. In the gondola, we got to see the beautiful view of Taipei City, nice green trees on the mountains and birds eye view of a man whacking weeds. Woo woo! (PS, I just checked the price for the Grouse Gondola. $39.95. Holy wow, seriously??).
Mel and her Dad
Melody and Jordan!
View of the city below
Glass floor!
The Gondola ride was, overall, pretty enjoyable. We got to the top to the area of Mao Kong (貓空), which is famous for its teas because many of their teas are harvested there. We ate a bit more delicious Taiwanese and Chinese food, such as stewed, minced pork on rice ( 魯肉飯 ), fried chicken nuggets and wintermelon tea (my favorite)! Afterwards, we took a peaceful, quiet stroll along the rural streets of Mao Kong. We decided to drink tea at one of the tea joints in area. My dad showed us how it was really done; it's not as simple as only putting tea leaves in a teapot and letting it sit and then pouring. It consists on about 10 pieces of equipment and lots of pouring. It was pretty cool!
Food stand at the top!
Fried Chicken!
View down the mountain
Taipei 101
Teapouring 101
We came back down onto the Gondola, and made our way to the Zoo. The last time I was at a zoo was preobably when I was really young, so it was a pretty awesome experience. We saw animals such as rhinoceros, zebras, panda, many types of snacks and lizards, Asiatic black bear, bobcat, lemur and many others! The sad thing was that we only had about 1.5 hours to spend there, so we didn't to see all of the animals there. I was very sad to miss the koala bears. But oh well, another time. It was pretty funny wathcing many of the animals, because a lot of teh were om noming because it was dinner time for them. That made us very hungry (well, I know it made me very hungry at least), so my dad took us to All you can eat Pizza Hut afterwards! Our dinner consisted of many types of salads, different kidns of pizza, such as Korean Prok and Kimchi pizza, Japense Seafood pizza, Mexican Jalapeno pizza and more! We also got to eat as much soup, and chicken wings as we want! One thing that made me super happy was the Egg Pudding 雞蛋布丁. I love Egg pudding. It is amazing. I think I had probably twenty squares of it? Oh yeah, so good.
Taipei Zoo
Looking at the animals
Turtle!
Pizza Hut Buffet
We were all pretty tired after a day of walking and lots of eating, so my dad took us back to the hotel. Jordan and I chilled for a couple hours, worked on some emailing etc. We decided to go for our own adventure into the night scene of Taipei! Jordan wanted to get some shots of Taipei 101. So we took the MRT to the closest stop, walked for a few minutes and took some awesome shots of some light decorations around the area, and also some night scene video shooting of the busy traffic on the streets. We walked a bit more, and ended up in front of the Taipei City Hall building, at perhaps the best angle of Taipei 101 we could ask for. So we took a few more shots and videos! We then walked back to our hotel. Oh, we stopped at 7-Eleven along the way and bought some beer. Yes, beer! If only our convenience stores (in Canada) sold that too :P
Night Traffic
??
Trippy light reflections in the pond
Love!
Couples shot in front of Taipei 101. Recommend that you go here right next to the bus stop if you want the best night view of Taipei 101 :)
Day 3 journal to come soon!
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