Sunday, June 25, 2006
taiwan part 2 (at last)
heya i'm back haha. i've been too lazy to post the rest about the taiwan trip, and the day i felt like it blogger was down, so... :) actually felt a bit lazy to do the rest today but i wouldn't want to let my enthusiastic readers down would i :) so...:day 4: went to this place called 九份 which is actually a place on a mountain...i dunno what to call it cos it's not exactly a town or village. it used to be a village but now it's more a tourist spot i guess. the whole place is basically made up of shophouses cos pple converted the first floor of their homes to shops. this is what a bit of it looks like:
it's a pretty endearing place...there's a shop where you can get clogs custom made; you choose the material and design you want on your clog and they make it on the spot! then there's a shop selling really good bbq stuff (mmmmm!) and another shop selling lovely 南瓜酥 and 杏仁酥 etc which is great to munch on especially when you're watching tv haha. lots of souvenir shops too where they sell mini-clogs in the form of keychains or the things you hang on your handphones. the only bad thing about that place is that motorcycles can use the paths where the pedestrains walk (you can see one in the pic) and they zoom around like nobody's business so it's kinda dangerous :( oh there are lots of shops selling smelly tofu too! to our disappointment, however, none of it was as good as the ones we had in china :( so if anyone goes to china, remember to try the smelly tofu!! highly recommended by your experienced foodie here :)
just a pic...we're pretty far up the mountain!
after we'd done our share of shopping (mainly buying food here!) we got on the coach again and went to shangri-la leisure farm, which is like a simple resort, with orchards far below from where we stayed. i was so looking forward to picking fruits but no! all out of season -_- so...just a walk down the path leading into the orchard and playing at the swings and other wooden structures which are a test of your balance. too bad i don't have pics of those!
the resort! and the orchards i was dying to go down into but couldn't :(
then there were night activities which were pretty fun. there was a top-spinning competition...it's the kind that's lost to our generation heh. you wind your string around a top, then you throw it out and yank the string off and see whose top spins the longest! then we got to play with 孔明灯! you know..those huge lanterns where you write your wishes and you light a thing at the bottom and after a while it floats up up up into the sky? too bad i don't have a pic of it :( anyway there's a simple machine there which makes tons of soap bubbles...my sis and i were the only pple playing under all the bubbles and other pple looked at us like we were madwomen...oh well :)
day 5: went to a museum...which had a lot of stuff that was taken from china around the time chiang kai-shek went over to taiwan. the entire exhibition wasn't completed yet but we got a good look at a lot of jade pieces...bronze tools and 鼎 and all...but as with museums no photography allowed so too bad :(
at night we went to this 士林夜市场 which is a HUGE pasar malam...you need a few hours to walk through it...as compared to the pasar malams we have here that take half an hour max. and there i had the absolute most heavenly fried chicken (香鸡扒) i've ever had in my life...it's NT$45 (about S$2) for a huge piece which is sprinkled with salt and pepper and some chilli powder...yum...that's one of the things i miss most! heard it's available at IMM...but dunno if it's any good! then they have this thing called 棺材板 which is a really thick slice of bread which they fry, then cut out the inside and stuff it with beef/chicken/lamb and all...YUM. there was a stall selling sugarcane juice..but instead of just plain old sugarcane that you get here...they use black sugarcane which tastes way way better, and they even have roasted-sugarcane juice + ginger which is, again, heavenly! there's a shop selling stuff made from ice...there's normal-textured ice like our ice kachang..but they have another kind which is like cotton candy except it's somehow spun from ice and just melts in your mouth! (too bad the machine was hidden so we couldn't get a look at all :( ) that's some stuff you must try in taiwan!
day 6: in the morning we went to some place (oops i don't really know what it's called) where the main attraction is actually the guards haha...it's terribly eerie cos those guys just stand there in uniform holding rifle for i think 2 hours...it's not just that they don't move...they don't even blink!! that's gotta be the worst job in the world :( the cute little kids on the tour with us were asking their moms really loudly about whether they were fake pple :)
then we went to sit on a huge ferris wheel which takes about 18 minutes to complete one round...so you can guess it goes really high up! too bad it was rainy/cloudy/foggy weather...so we couldn't see too much scenery :(
anyway the rest of the day was spent shopping la...yet another huge shopping place! we were there from about 4pm till about 11pm...so imagine! bought a lot of bags and clothes over there...reasonable price and pretty good quality (: one thing i learnt from shopping in taiwan is that the people are very friendly and helpful...and they give reasonable prices unlike in china where a lot of shopkeepers give sky-high prices initially and you have to bargain with them :(
day 7: home sweet home!! ^_^ ok la a few interesting (or so i think) points about taiwan:
- their most popular game in the arcades is this shooting game...not guns but basketball! you have 6 balls and you keep shooting at the hoop in stage 1..then in stage 2 the hoop moves left and right and it moves faster and faster as you go up the stages i think. they have no daytona in taiwan! (or at least not as far as we saw)
- taiwan pple can dress pretty outrageously...not the scandalous expose-all-you-can type...but rather the eccentric match of clothes...but they still look good!
- the train system is just like our mrt..including the farecards and ticket machines etc...but i think theirs is somewhat better cos in the carriage they have bars attached to the carriage ceiling (like those on our trans-island buses now) that announce the current and next stop. and their seats are all arranged in L-shapes which i think is less cold than our straight lines on either side of the train! and somehow you can always get seats on the train! :)
no more for the time being...to make up for the lack of pictures here's a pretty sunflower!! :)
yueyen at 12:04 AM