Taipei and around

When we arrived at the airport our local organizer from Taiwan Tourism was already waiting for us to pick us up and directly transfer us to our first halfday tour. Meeting her in person after only knowing her from the travel arrangements was very nice and she made our trip very convenient, never have been on tour so fast before ;)

The tourguide however was not so happy about us since we were delaying the whole tour by 15 minutes and he had to rush over the first part (Chiang Kai Shek-memorial) in order to make it in time for the changing of the guards in front of the shrine of the unknown soldier.

Guards never blinked with the eyes, we closely observed this :)

After the tour we got invited to dinner by our organizer Ms. Lee at our hotel and talked about Peter "Akataki" ;) She seems to be a very busy woman but still managed to spend quite some time with us and tried everything to make our stay as comfortable as possible.

Day 2

tour to the north shores. Would have been great since the scenery is supposed to be really nice, but the weather was very rainy and with our tiny travel umbrella we were soon completely soaked. Our tourgide this time was very young and hardly able to speak english, we had a lot of fun trying to communicate with her using hands and feet ;)

To escape the rain for a while we visited a local fish market, which was somehow stunning and pittiful at the same time since there were many for us yet unknown species of fish and all alive.

Never seen this kind of mussles before for example, I wonder how their small shells should protect the whole body? Kathi would for sure not be too happy to find them in her dinner though.

At the next market they had very tasty almond milk (which Taiwanese people do NOT like a lot according to our guide) and frightening looking chicken wings and bones (which Taiwanese people DO like a lot according to our guide). One interesting local speciality is the so called "stinky tofu". The name is very well chosen since it smells like never cleaned casern latrines! Of course we had to try this!

Tasty but far too stinky

In the evening we got again! invited for dinner in a very very delicious dim sum restaurant just right under the Taipei 101 tower!

Yummiiee

Never had that good dim sums before! (sorry Valentin but the restaurant even received a Michelin star)

Day 3

On our third day in taipei we again tried a tour to the shores (this time to the east coast) in the pure hope it would not be raining all day again although the forecast and locals told us otherwise.

And in fact - we had very lovely weather for the whole day! The tour in total was a great experience, the guide was very motivated, very funny and very fluent in english. Took a lot of pictures of the beautifull scenery at the shore directly adjacent to the tropical rainforest, this is a true "formosa" island!

Joe the driver guide and Franz - see the amazing coastline in the background!

Visited a gold mine and a rebuilt japanese settlement building, first time to see a japanese home from the inside although we just came from a 2 weeks trip through Japan! And of course the enriching experience of touching a real(?) 220kg barrel of gold.

Kathi hiding nearly perfectly inside a lorrey of the gold mine (and catching a nice sunburn)

Taiwan is well known for its tea and tea culture. If you really want to enjoy tea the taiwanese way, you can not just soak the tea leaves for a while, there is a whole ceremony around the preparation of every cup of tea. That might sound complicated, but is in fact a very relaxing way of drinking tea. We had the chance to learn about this ceremony in a traditional tea house in Jioufen.

Back in Taipei we finally got nice weather to go up on the Taipei 101!

Currently the third tallest building in the world

That's us with the Taipei 101 mascot on the 91th floor of the building