Three wonderful days

Wauw! My Saturday, Sunday and Monday have been soooo bussy – but SOOO good too! It has been three days of experiences, with three different groups of people and each day brought me to se Taipei from a new point of view!

    Saturday I met Isabel (german exchange student) at Taipei main station, and from that meeting point our “explore Taipei” day begun! At first we went shopping in Taipei Main station Underground Mall, which is a very long underground shopping centre. In one part of the centre everything was very cheap (you can actually boy clothes for 100 TN$, which is like 18,3 DKK) and in another part of the centre you found the more expensive stuff like luxury body product and high-class clothing. I have to say that I find it very unnecessarily to spend my money on the expensive clothes when they have so much pretty and cool clothes that in addition are inexpensive.

    And as I probably have told you before, the food here is very cheap to, so Isabel and I found a bakery and bought two traditional Taiwanese cakes. The outer was like a pie while the inner was kind of like vanilla crème with a slight taste of lemon. – very delicious!

The cake

To see Taipei from another angle than cheap shopping and eating we decided to go to the Museum of Contemporary art. It is a Museum next to Taipei Main Station that changes its exhibitions regularly to live up to its name: “Museum of CONTEMPORARY art”. After 20 minutes in a  waiting line we finally got into the museum – and got surprised! This period’s exhibition was all about World of Warcraft, you see. And to those of you who don’t know World of Warcraft then all I can tell you is, that it is an online computer game where imaginative creatures fight each other. Try to google some pictures and you will find out that this was absolutely not what Isabel and I had expected to see…. Anyway it was fun to watch people inside the museum as they were all very in to this game (in some cases I actually found it fantastic that the persons had paused their games and left their computers to go outside and watch this exhibition) :p

People taking fotos of the world of warcraft drawings - I took fotos of the people instead!

    Eventually (after a lot of “people watching” at the Museum) we took the MRT to Shilin night market together with Daniel (an exchange student from Switzerland) and Isabel’s host brother. Once again I have to say that I love the night markets because of the good atmosphere and because of the cheap stuff a food. This time I am not going to list all the food that I ate (because there is too much) …

Even though Shilin is not known for snakes (you have to go to the Snake Alley) we found one anyway

Instead I’m going to talk about the food I got for lunch on Sunday. My host family had taken me to a big shopping mall to look for some stuff like a dictionary. But the important thing is, that we had lunch at a real sushi bar – you know, the kind where the sushi comes on assembly lines! So you just sit down, and then you pick the sushi you want as it passes you. I want to tell about my favourite, but I have just realised, that I can’t pick one! Everything was simply too delicious! For instance there were some with rice, seaweed and salmon, some with tuna, some with shrimps, and some cones with vegetables and dressing. Mmmmmm :)

    But the day went even better as a girl named Penny invited me to her housewarming party. She told me that she had just moved to the countryside to get some more space, so as the bus suddenly stopped in front of her apartment, I was sure that we (me and my youngest host sister) were at the wrong place. To me, this was not countryside, you see – it was city! City with lot of new, modern skyscrapers! Well anyway we had an awesome time. We were only around 10 people and for that reason a really got to speak to all of them, and not just “Hi, I’m from Denmark. Bye bye”. That was great, and I really think I made some friends there!

And talking about friends we move on to Monday. That is, that in the afternoon my Class Teacher had invited me to sightseeing in Taipei together with her daughter and my school counsellor. And this time, the journey went to National Taiwan Palace Museum! If you know just a little about Chinese history you’ll probably know that during the Civil War in China, almost all of the treasures of the country were moved to Taiwan (which at that time was a part of China) in order to protect them – and they’ve never returned to the mainland. That is why The National Taiwan Palace Museum has the world’s biggest collection of Chinese treasures/art. They too change their exhibition regularly but still it takes years to show all the treasures! Amazing! I really owe my teacher big time for taking me there.

   And so, I also owe my school counsellor for taking me to another night marked. This time it wasn’t Shilin but Sheda – maybe a bit smaller but very, very cosy! In addition to eating a lot we also bought a birthday book as Chelsea (an exchange student from America who is also on my school) has birthday on Thursday or Friday (sorry, but right now, I can’t remember) :D Once again I am not going to tell about all the food – just one thing: A warm cake that tasted like pancakes or waffles, just thicker (like with two layers) and something in the middle. I had one with vanilla crème but you can also have it with chocolate and a lot of other things – mmmmm :D

Now, that was three days with different ways of experiencing Taipei. One day was exploring it with my friend (almost like a tourist) another day was very intimate with the Sushi eating with my family and the private housewarming party and a third day was a historical and cultural day with my teachers! I have to say, that I love it!  

Julia :)