It has finally come to the time of the year where Ninja Ryan's family plans their annual holiday. 2012's destination? Taipei, Taiwan!
The trip to me was a bit spontaneous and all bookings were done in quite a rush, burned a hole in my wallet, but we all manage to secure a nice hotel in a very good location. We were staying at Yomi Hotel is Taipei which is about less than 10 minutes walking distance from ShuangLian MRT station. The hotel was really lovely and cosy, I could only complain about the pillows which were too flat. I need fluffy pillows!
Having only 5 days (26 Oct - 31 Oct, we arrived pretty late at night so it doesn't really count as a 6 days trip) to explore Taipei, we had to do a lot of impromptu planning at breakfast every morning. With the guide that my friend Pauline from work provided, along with a MRT map, we planned each location in sequence. And normally we tend to wake up earlier during a holiday trip so we won't miss out any sights, we discovered that almost every where is Taipei only opens for business at around noon. Our feet touched the ground of Ximen, Wu Fen Pu, Shilin, Jiu Fen, Tam Sui....... I can't remember the names of half of the places. Serves me right for waiting till almost a month later to blog about the trip.
The whole of Taipei was like a land of pasar malam. Every corner of the street are filled with little stores doing little businesses selling a range of things from shoes, clothes to food. And business starts from afternoon till late night. Their malls are quite small compared to those in Kuala Lumpur and Taiwan people are so much more polite compared to Hong Kong shop vendors. And it's so clean there though it is very tough to find a garbage bin anywhere! But the shop vendors actually offer to help us dispose of our empty wrappers after we have eaten our purchase of street food. Sitting is a luxury there, because hunting for a bench to sit on is like a treasure hunt! Little adorable doggies can be seen almost every area we went.
Luckily even though my Mandarin was not very good, it was quite alright communicating with people there and they tried their best to reply us in simple English too. I can't remember all the names of the places we visited, there were too many and all the names are in Chinese. But we did visit Shilin Street Market 3 times! We could not get enough of Shilin Market, we tried to try as much of the street food as we could too.
