Taiwan May 2008, Part 2

Day 2/Taipei

After a good night's sleep at Michael's place, we started the day with a traditional, good old fashion breakfast, Taiwanese style, at a good old traditional breakfast place.

First great dicovery on the trip: Taiwan boasts the best, and I mean the BEST, soybean milk in the WORLD. From this day onwards, one of my life's tragedies would be not being able to drink this wonderful drink everyday.

See that rolled up thing in the background? Another wonderful Chinese invention, a breakfast rice roll with a crispy oily lovely piece of fried bread, and various other tasty morsels like egg, ham and meat floss rolled up inside. YUM.

And then, under Michael and Po Po's capable guidance, we began our tour of the amazing Taipei.

First trip on the Taipei equivalent of the subway/MRT:

Then the bus,

And we are at the great National Palace Museum of Taiwan.

Where the view is incredible,

And where we had fun making asses of ourselves taking bizarre photos

I didn't take any photos of the exhibits, but the size of the musuem is incredible, and I would love to have days to explore it. The 2 hours I had really didn't do it justice.

Lunch:

Pig's tongue, which is delicious. A strange but lovely texture, firm yet silky at the same time.

Then some famous temple. No idea which, I think its the Long San Shi [Dragon Mountain Temple?], they all look the same, and I'm no stranger to temples anyways.

And then, since it costs a ridiculous amount of money to see the tallest building in the world right now, the Taipei 101 building, Michael found us an alternative:

To view Taipei 101 from atop the mountain/hill, Xiang Shan, or Elephant Mountain.

Up there, not only did we get a magnificent view of the building,

We got a magnificent view of the city as well!

Next, time for dinner! And of course, we headed for another night market. Hint: its THE famous one this time!

Yup, its the famous Shilin Night Market. We ate the famous stuff, and they were nice, but not as fantastic as everyone makes them out to be. Still, a dinner at a night market beats hand down, for me, a dinner at some stupid touristy restaurant, so it was good. There must be a zillion pictures out there of food from Shilin, so I won't waste my time. And this concludes our second day =)