I had kind of left Friday and Saturday open on my itinerary, and figured I'd use those days to see anything I might have missed during the week or heard about while there. I decided to go to Beitou that morning to check out the Beitou Hot Springs Museum, which had been closed the last time I was there. After a long subway ride (it's pretty far north of the Taipei proper), and a steamy hike up a hill, I encountered this:
NOOOOO! Closed again! And for a long time! How in the world did I miss this in my planning? Probably because it was on my "maybe" list. Well, I guess this just means I'll have to go back to Taiwan again some day. ;)
I decided not to go to one of the public bath houses because 1) I didn't bring a bathing suit, and 2) it was so freaking hot and steamy it was like I was already in a bath house. Why would I want to go sit in a hot spring? All of Taiwan was practically a hot spring!
So I hiked up to the Thermal Valley instead, which is like a little park area with a big hot spring.
It was scenic.
AND HOT. Even hotter than just regular Taipei!
Fun fact: people used to come down to this hot spring and cook eggs and such in it, until the late 90s when the government must've gotten tired of people getting scorched and the hot spring getting polluted. So now you can only walk around it. These cool trees with all the vines were nearby.
A view from the north end.
Walking back down the hill there were several scenic spots along the stream that runs from the hot springs.
I got back to the subway station and decided to take a pic because this is what the platforms of a lot of the outdoor stations look like - it's all lush and green and full of big buildings!
So this may sound crazy, but since I had the time, I decided to go see what a foreign Costco was like! I got a bit lost, but I eventually found it. (It was a good 20 minute walk from the MRT station and the roads in that part of the city seemed even crazier than normal.) ((Also, even with a map I often go the wrong way a couple of times. It's my thing.))
So the first level was the food court and bathrooms and a decent sized parking garage. Notice the clam chowder, chicken sandwich, and mango ice on the menu!
The warehouse was actually all underground! It was a full-sized warehouse, too.
Yup, looks like Costco. They had quite a bit of Kirtland brand stuff. I also went over to the clothes, hoping to find something interesting, but it was all pretty much the same as in the states.
But there was still plenty of other things that were quite different! Like this mango milk pudding. Doesn't that look yummy?
And their muffins are swirled!
Quaker has lots of breakfast products there, only instead of oatmeal it seemed to be a lot of different drinks and cereal made from weird grains.
The snacks were fun to look at. The kids are lucky these were all in big boxes or I would have been tempted to buy some!
I ended my tour with a honey lemon smoothie that was so good! It was perfect while wandering the steamy streets back to the MRT station.
Lance's meetings ended early that day, so he met me up at the Guandu MRT station. I had been wandering the area and there wasn't much in the way of restaurants, so we stopped in at a bakery across the street of the station for some lunch. You wouldn't know it, but Taiwan has a pretty happenin' bakery scene - lots of bakeries with delicious baked goods! I decided to go with their version of pizza, mainly because I liked the look of all the veggies on top: pumpkin, corn, broccoli, mushrooms, and peppers. There was a little marinara and a smattering of cheese. It was delicious.
Once we finished lunch we decided to hoof it to the Guandu temple. This is just a random street, but I liked it because of all the scooters parked. Taipei has SO MANY SCOOTERS!
We finally reached the temple and I was immediately impressed - I hadn't expected it to be so big! I had briefly read about it in a book or maybe online... I can't remember. I just remember thinking, well, I'll be in the area, might as well check it out! I'm so glad we did - it was really cool!
The temple consisted of a really big compound of buildings. Here was the main one for worship. It wasn't too busy since it was the middle of a weekday. This temple was built in the 1700s.
We wandered a bit and were even lucky enough to find a cold water dispenser - lots of the water dispensers around the city only dispense tepid water at best. The Taiwanese are apparently not fans of drinking cold water? Which I find weird, but I'm sure they feel the same way about us Americans and our ice cold and refreshing beverages.
Many parts of the temple were quite ornate.
This temple is built up against a mountain and has 2 tunnels that lead from the temple, through the mountain, and end outside the compound. Only it took us a few minutes figure out where the tunnels were because even though there was plenty of English signage around they labeled them as pits.
This tickled us to no end, because "pit" is just close enough to "tunnel" to kind of make sense, but also pretty wrong. I think we decided tunnels could be considered horizontal pits!
Lots of ornate carvings and statues.
So each temple we went to had room upon room upon room of these little lights.
It was truly impressive! (Most of the other temples had orange instead of red, but I liked the red best.)
Here's the crazy thing about them - each little light has the name, birth date, and death date of someone's ancestor. I'm assuming families pay to have those names there. And I'm assuming they're there to be worshiped or something similar - most of these religions are into ancestor worship and such. It was an awesome visual reminder of how important - and extensive - family history can be. Family history is gonna go crazy once China opens up to missionary work, assuming they have temples like these. I don't know - I guess I'll have to go to China to check it out. (Fingers crossed!)
More amazing carvings.
That's Taipei 101 off in the distance.
I really, really liked this temple. It could have been because Lance was with me. But also, it was a super cool temple!
After Guandu we decided to go check out a little of Tamsui, a coastal city just north of Taipei. This sign made me laugh - Vergan food. :)
They had their own little Old Street, which was basically a daytime night market in some parts. I had these candied berries and tomatoes last time I was in Taiwan.
I also saw some more pretty awesome bad English!
Oddly, they were giving out quite a few free samples on this street. (Kind of unusual, at least compared to the places we had been.) I had some awesome almond milk and delicious fried squid. Yum.
But it was so stinkin' hot, all we really wanted was some drinks. Fortunately, there was always a 7-eleven near by! My Coke Zero had some young Asian pop star on it.
We went down by the water to drink our Cokes, hoping it would be a bit cooler since it was the ocean and all.
It was NOT. *sigh*
This area was way more touristy than I was used to. I guess Tamsui is really big for tourism because it's on the coast. We could have taken a ferry up to the fisherman's warf, but from what I read it was pretty similar to Pier 39 in San Francisco. No thanks.
When we saw these ice cream cones I just KNEW we had to get some, if only to send pictures of them to the kids. My flavors were strawberry (pink) and sweet potato (purple), which sounds weird but was super good.
Only, Taiwanese soft serve has a lot more ice in it than regular soft serve, so it melted super crazy fast. I was like a 5 year old with ice cream melting all over my hand!
We got back to the hotel room and crashed! (Well, Lance did.) Yes, that's purple striped wall paper. I wish I had taken more pics of the hotel. It was... eclectic. But nice and perfectly located and decently priced, so totally worth it. Here's the website, in case you're interested.
That night we decided to check out a dim-sum place that was in a cool neighborhood near our hotel. It was supposed to be just as good - if not better - than the most famous dim-sum restaurant in Taiwan. (Which is expensive and always has a long wait.)
Good thing we had an exact address and a picture of the place, otherwise I don't know that we would have ever found it! The kitchen is that entire first floor. You can order to go right there on the street, or go upstairs to eat.
So we get up there and they give you this little clipboard with a list on it that you're supposed to use to place your order. It was completely in Mandarin. Fortunately, our waitress handed us a menu with pictures and English, which we used to mark our order.
It was So. Good. Like, probably one of the best meals on our whole trip! Lance ordered these pork steamed dumplings. You get a little bowl and little soup spoon and you use your chopsticks to dip your dumpling in another little bowl that has freshly shredded ginger (heaven!) and soy sauce. Then you put the dumpling on the spoon and take a bite; the liquid in the dumpling falls into the spoon/bowl and then you can drink that so none of the deliciousness is wasted.
I ordered shrimp dumplings. They were life changing.
We also got some beef and rice and sides that were also quite tasty. (But nothing compares to dumplings in my eyes!)
So after dinner we decided we'd go check out a night market for dessert. One of the closest (I think? I really can't remember why we chose to go to this one) was Ximending, so we headed out there. As you can see, it's right by what is kinda like the Time's Square of Taipei. Very hip, very trendy, very bright.
Also, very much NOT a night market! No awesome food to be found. No little stalls. Just stores and 30,000 of the Island's 16-28 year old population. We were definitely out of place here, and not just because of our race.
As you can tell, I did not like this supposed "night market". It was pretty disappointing. We never did find any dessert, which is even sadder, right?
Oh well. You have to experience a bad night market to really appreciate a good one, right? (Plus, we had just had an amazing meal. It's not like we starved.)
