Taipei Night Tour

After rushing home earlier than I wanted from the Taipei Zoo, I went on my scheduled Taipei Night Tour. I was the only tourist, so I had the driver and his regular car instead of a van. First we went to a Mongolian barbecue. Here, there was a big food and salad bar with lots of stuff that I don't remember, but which was good. The barbecue part is where you go to a different food bar, which has a bunch of thinly sliced raw meats, vegetables, and sauces. You take a bowl, put a bunch of stuff in it that seems like it would taste good together, and give it to one of the cooks. Then he barbecues it for you, like so, and you eat it with relish (the feeling, not the sauce).

A giant group of Koreans came to the restaurant, as they tend to do, and it was kind of like being at home again for a little while. 

I think our first stop was a famous night market, but it was pretty small; seemed to just be one long block on one street:

The guide couldn't park right there, so he told me (after a few tries) to just go through, not taking too long, and meet him at the other side. On the way through, I saw what he had specifically told me about, which was a displaymonstration of a giant python, and some other big snakes, which was at a restaurant where you can eat them. No pictures were allowed. Having owned a snake previously, I think I might feel bad about eating one. I'm sure it was also very expensive.

I bought one souvenir, a wall scroll of a tiger, to add to my collection of wall scrolls across Asia.

Next was the major stop to the Taipei 101. It was extra to go up to the observation tower, and I was on a time budget because of the parking time limit. Normally for tours they let you stay as long as you want, but normally tours are quite a bit bigger than one person, so there would be no leniency for me. BOOOOO-urns.

This is the line I had to wait in for like 15-20 minutes.

On the way, they took your picture and you could take your ticket to get it superimposed onto a Taipei 101 background, either at night or in the day. They showed a bunch of examples on screens, but I don't think you could ever see yourself or anyone currently in line up there. Would that be unethical, or at least rude, in case someone wasn't down with it?

The DLI63 building in Seoul took about 30 seconds to get to the top, but in the Taipei 101, the elevator ride was longer. You actually only got to go up to the 89th floor, which disappointed me greatly.

Here are some views from the 89th floor:

 I don't remember what the hell this is doing there.

On the 88th floor, you can see the tuned mass damper, which helps keep the building from becoming damaged from strong winds. It's suspended from a high floor, and is a huge pendulum that sways in reaction to the movement of the building. This one is the biggest damper sphere in the world, according to Wikipedia.

Finally, we saw the Lungshan Temple, which was very beautiful, but as always, temples are not my cup of tea. I have nothing further to say about this place, so here are some pictures:

The End.

Taipei Zoo

In looking through the tourist brochure for Taipei, I saw there was a zoo, and that it was easily accessible via the subway. I decided I would go to the zoo during the day before I went on my Taipei Night Tour a couple days after I got to the city. When I read the brochure, it told me that the zoo was open from something like 9 to 5, and that they stopped taking visitors at 4:30. This led me to believe that the zoo was small. I was wrong.

The Taipei Zoo is the biggest zoo in Asia, as I read on a sign when I was there. I wish the brochure had mentioned this. I had taken to getting up not very early in the morning, and lazing about (it was a vacation, after all, and I'd just finished my teaching contract) for a couple hours before venturing out. So I didn't get to the zoo until maybe noontime, and I knew I had to leave around 4:00 to make sure and be back in time for my tour that evening. Luckily, the entrance fee was very cheap--about US$2. It took me a while to realize just how big the zoo was, because the signage wasn't that great at the entrance--it really seemed pretty small and hokey. So I wasted a lot of time looking at farm animals and bored monkeys in the beginning.

Sorry, the pictures are all out of order and screwed up because of transferring from my memory card to a computer that belonged to this lady from London I met at the hostel, and because this stupid website now only allows for one photo to be uploaded at a time, and it doesn't necessarily put them at the end each time. I've always had a problem with Blogger's photo uploading impotence, but this beats all now.

As you can imagine, a lot of these photos will be taken through glass. This one looks kind of like a painting.

Not a real cow.

The koalas were not very cooperative.

Once I got to the panda house, it started getting cool. Because the pandas are so popular, of course they had their own whole building, where you go up a ramp with a lot of panda info to get to the viewing area.

There were statues outside the building, and a lot of provisions for extremely long lines. Luckily I went on a weekday, so there was no line outside, just a short one inside that went fast.

Pandas. I think they are Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan:

I don't know which one this is, but he did not face the audience the whole time I was there.

Not real pandas.

Panda poop.

This is one of the gift shops, but it didn't have a lot of panda stuff in it. I just liked the big woolly mammoth. In one of the other gift shops I bought a bunch of panda stuff as gifts and for myself. Pandas are cute.

Find the owl:

Sloth.

All the videos get uploaded to the end of the blog, and it's getting late, so I'm not going to maneuver them around at this point. Anyway, I missed a ton of the Australian and African animals, though I did get to see some very cute kangaroos and wallabies. And lots of other animals. No lions. It was fun. If I go to Taipei again, which I plan to do because I plan to eventually teach in Taiwan, I'll go back and do the whole zoo.