Another fun day in Taipei seeing even more of the sights, eating the food and drinking so many cold drinks! Icecream from Cold Stone Creamery as a sort of lunch (most decadent sort of lunch!), and more dumplings with a friend for dinner. Brilliant!

In terms of sights, I got to go to look around Huashan Creative Park’s buildings in more details, and then went over to see the Sun Yat-Sen memorial I’m actual daylight. Even got to see the changing of the guard; I know the Buckingham Palace guards stand to attention but good grief, this was intense! The two soldiers had their hands clenched and you couldn’t even see them breathe, they were so strict in their discipline. When the changing of the guards actually happened, a flock of tourists were pushing their way to get the best videos, while a couple of children were going berserk in the background. The more things change etc…!

After that we found ourselves making our way over to Longshan Temple which is the oldest one in Taipei, founded by immigrants from Fujian province in mainland China in the 1700s. It’s huge and I had absolutely no idea of what was going on, but there were so many people inside praying and checking their fortune, it was quite amazing how such an old building is still being so fervently and loudly used!

 

Finally went to Taipei 101, which I’ve seen since first arriving in Taipei but not actually gone near, and it is an impressive building with a swanky shopping mall on the lower floors. Went up in the lift which apparently goes at speeds of 1000 metres per minute, taking us from floor 5 to floor 89 in about 40 secs, with something in the lift to stabilise the atmospheric pressure to stop your ears popping as much, and came out on the 89th floor! It was strangely serene up there, very different to the Empire State Building as the queue was well managed and quick, and people weren’t desperately pushing at each other to get the best views. And we’d picked a good day, as the views were super!

As we’d timed the visit well, we got to see the view both in daylight and at night. Only 500NTD (around £11) so well priced compared to similar attractions in other major world cities, but was so nice. We even got to go outside onto their viewing platform, without glass (just a metal fence)! The only tacky bit was when trying to leave, as you ended up walking the entire circumference of the tower through tacky coral crystal displays (massive coral crystal tree for £600,000 anyone?!!) but it was weirdly funny as it was so different from the atmosphere during the rest of our time at Taipei 101.

Finished off the evening in a random dodgy dive bar. Beer was only £3.50 which is good for Taipei, but indoor smoking is apparently still very much a thing here; felt so alien, like going back in time to the 1990s! Tomorrow, will be off to Jiufen.

So, Taiwanese romanisation is confusing and for someone who has learnt mainland pinyin, rather confusing! I spent a good 10 minutes the other day trying to decipher what on earth ‘cyuen’ was (spoilers, it was ‘quan’) and so even trying to go to Tamshui was good fun as all the signs and some of the tourist information seemed to use entirely different spellings!

Its easy to get to, just a short 35 minutes on the metro from Taipei Railway Station by taking the red line, and for the last 20 mins or so you get to travel above ground which is always pleasant. It takes you right out to north west of Taipei, by the sea, to an old harbour town.

 

The weather was gorgeous, about 36C in the shade, and so I took a walk along Zhongzheng Road which has most of the older buildings on it. There are temples, street vendors, food, clothes shops, as well as a lot of historical architecture. I also noticed that a lot of places or roads here were named after someone called Mackay, and there was a statue of him and multiple museums dedicated to him. Turns out he was a Canadian missionary in the 1800s who set up medical surgeries, a girls’ school, and a university. He was also impressively beardy!

As it was an old port town, there were also a number of attractions dedicated to Japanese rule or Qing dynasty rule, such as the Japanese governor’s house, a foreigner graveyard of all the foreigners who died in the 1800s – there was a grave of a young sailor in his 20s from Newcastle upon Tyne – he died a long way from home.

I then wandered down to the harbourside, to the old Japanese customs house and port. There was also the former British consulate. The sun was just starting to set which made it less unpleasantly hot and more just magnificent to watch the world go by. Would recommend a visit to Tamshui if you are in Taipei for a few days!

I had one more day in Taichung and was hoping to use it to go on a day trip to Sun Moon Lake… Sadly it was not to be as the weather was so atrocious, the hostel staff advised I wouldn’t see anything really and it wouldn’t be worth travelling such a long way under these conditions. So I needed a new plan, so decided to go to more far flung attractions within the city itself.

I first made my way to Tunghai University in the far west of the city to admire the Tang Dynasty style architecture and in particular to see the Luce memorial chapel, as its architecture is particularly striking. It seemed to take forever to get there but was greeted with more rain, and some students practicing street dancing to ‘Uptown Funk’ – brilliant!

After wandering around campus, I decided to go to the National Museum for Fine Arts which is in south Taichung. I saw there was a bus that directly connected the two locations, perfect! Or it would have been had the bus arrived. It was supposed to come every 15-20 minutes but in fact took nearly an hour to arrive. Don’t trust the number 75! I was thankful that our bus stop was actually sheltered from the rain, as the one across the road had no shelter!

The art museum was quite enjoyable (for those who know me they’ll know just how weird that sounds!) – it was free which always helps, and had exhibitions of photographs of Taiwan from the last 120 years which is well worth seeing to show how the country has changed, and particular to understand more about Taiwan’s indigenous tribes. The exhibition of prints had some beautiful pieces… And the museum was the perfect shelter from the rain!

I then walked down the rest of the greenway past the canal to visit Taichung’s best known and oldest temple, Wanhe Gong, from the 1700s.

A quick bit of uninspiring “Japanese” food then off to bed!

Taichung is cool. Like, really really cool. Not in a trying too hard sort of way, but just self-confident, like it knows that it’s attracting all the cool young people to live here, and it knows it can mix the modern middle-class lifestyle with Taiwanese traditions successfully and completely get away with it!

It is still most definitely not one of the big two cities here in Taiwan, as its public transport beyond the main highway is a bit infrequent, but once you get out West past the dilapidated but strangely enticing old Japanese central area, you find where the action is at.

I left Tainan from the main train station this morning, and to show me one more time how friendly the people are there, an old lady proudly greeted me in English as we were crossing the road, and even said “pleased to meet you”! Much better than the surly boy yesterday in Anping who said “foreigner” and then just stared at me – I really haven’t missed that! I got the slow express train from Tainan to Taichung, which still only takes 2 hours, and allowed a more leisurely view of the countryside.

There’s a great urban green walking zone called the Calligraphy Greenway, which is this wide pedestrianised stretch of land from north to south, linking the museum of natural science with the museum of fine art, allowing people to walk, mingle, relax, walk their dogs, without having to continually cross the road every 2 mins. Beautiful!

I wandered down into a department store as everyone seemed to be going there… And I may have bought a copy of the new Harry Potter script from a bookshop there (imported from the US) and got a free toy Hedwig as it was launch day here! I then treated myself to an icecream from Cold Stone Creamery – it was either that or a quinoa burger which was the other big food thing they had in this store. Really reminded me of Whole Foods!

I also noticed the massive prevalence of Japanese food here in Taichung – it seems that everywhere I walk here in the West District, I go past another Japanese restaurant. In honour of this, I had Taiwanese style udon noodles before walking over to Fengjia Night Market.

The night market is apparently one of the biggest in the country? It is near Feng Chia university so lots of students were there, but also entire families. It never fails to astound me just how many people are out on the streets eating and drinking so late at night! Stalls sold everything from t-shirts to stinky tofu, from pearl tea to “pick your own shrimp and then we’ll grill it on a skewer” and everything in between!

I personally decided to try to try one stall which had an incredibly long queue, and was for Massage Chicken (An Mo Ji Pai): it was so tender and juicy, and the stall holder was very friendly as well, and warning me about how hot the box would be so to be careful when eating, and that the spice was hot so did I definitely want any? He also complimented me on my crap Chinese 👌🏻 I’ll take it!