Adventure #280

It's travel adventure time with Polar Bear and Barbie. We are off to Taiwan, specifically the capital city of Taipei. We left Las Vegas for Seattle in the morning, then off to Tokyo and from there Taipei on a 747. We landed around nine o'clock pm the next day. After a wicked long customs line we were off on a hour long bus ride to the main train station. Then a short metro ride to the area around our hotel. All the reviews online said our hotel was hard to find, which was true. Thankfully I wrote down good directions and with Matt's good sense of direction we were able to find iTrip Taipei Inn, which is in the same building as an electronics junk store mall. The picture below is the entrance to the mall.    

This is the hallway to the elevators for our hotel.

The hotel lobby.

Our piano room. I saw pictures of these rooms online and hoped we would be staying in one.

After a good night's sleep and breakfast at our hotel, we set off on the metro. We bought Easy Cards at the metro station, which allows you to tap on and off trains, instead of buying tickets every time. Matt and I used this same method in Hong Kong with their Octopus Card. It is super convenient. Asians are so smart. Cough. Cough. Get on board Europe. After leaving the metro we set out to find the trail head for Elephant Mountain, which was hidden in a neighborhood. The trail was actually a giant stone staircase. So many stairs. Thankfully there are gorgeous views of Taipei at the top of the stairs.     

We walked down the stairs of Elephant Mountain and towards the Taipei 101, the fifth tallest building in the world at 1,474 feet.

The Taipei 101 is an office building but on the first five floors there is a shopping mall and food court, where Matt and I had lunch. I had a passion fruit smoothie and Matt had pearl bean. We also had noodles, soup, and what I assume was bok choy. Yummy. Dessert was a wheel cake filled with red beans. It was delicious but looked like I was eating black beans straight from a can.    

After lunch we went to the fifth floor to buy tickets for the observation deck on the 89th floor, which were ridiculously cheap at $30 total. We stood in line to ride the fastest elevator in the world with a speed of 37.7mph, within seconds we were on the 89th floor. We had a 360 degree view of Taipei from the windows while listening to our free audio guides, which explained about the various buildings and districts of Taipei.  

We were able to see the largest damper sphere in the world at 18 feet in diameter, suspended from the 92nd to the 87th floors. The sphere moves to offset the movement of the building in strong winds.

Then we took a couple flights of stairs to the 91st floor's outdoor observation deck. It was super windy which made my cool hairdo even cooler.

We took the elevator back to the fifth floor and left the Taipei 101 to explore a busy street. We stopped at the Sun Yat-se Memorial Hall which had a nice view of the Taipei 101.

We took the metro back to the area called Ximending, which is where our hotel was. We walked the pedestrian streets enjoying the neon lights. We had a kebab for dinner and went to bed.