Foreigner Day in Taipei

I made it back to the good old U.S. of A yesterday around 4 p.m. our time, I think it was 5 a.m. on Tuesday in Taiwan. After such an amazing trip, I must admit that it was really hard to say goodbye to Danielle. We had SO MUCH fun together over the past week! I am so thankful for my sweet friend!

Now, I'm going to continue sharing about our adventures:

Wednesday - Foreigner Day

This was probably my favorite full day of fun. We started out in the morning heading to the hot springs at Beitou with Bev. It was so beautiful! We went to this placed called Beitou Thermal Valley which was the natural hot spring. It was boiling water that was around 90 degrees Celsius! There was all of this steam coming off of the water due to the heat and it felt so mystical. Then we went to the public hot springs pools.

There were four levels of pools with increasing temperatures. We started out in the bottom pool and can I just say that they must not see foreigners often, because everyone was staring at us like we were monkeys or something. It's hard not be self-conscious when you have over 100 pairs of eyes staring at you, but oh well, what can you do? We went up to the third pool, and it was too hot to even stick our feet in. Danielle hopped out really fast and everyone laughed. I knew that if she couldn't handle it, I probably couldn't either, so we headed down to the second pool which didn't seem that hot anymore. After about 20 more minutes we were done with the hot pools. It was nice and relaxing, but you don't want to stay in too long or you get overheated!

That afternoon Danielle and I headed to Taipei 101. I don't know if you remember my post about this one, but 101 is actually a large skyscraper that was the world's tallest building until the end 0f 2009, not a class on the history of Taipei, haha. This was so much fun! Obviously it is the tallest building that I've ever seen in my life! We went up to the observation deck on the 89th floor and got an awesome view of this incredible city! Then we went up to the 91st floor which had an outdoor deck. It was freezing cold, so we didn't stay out too long, but Danielle was able to find the area where she lives, so that was fun! We also identified some of the big sights like the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Memorial, Miramar and the MacArthur bridges (named for Gen. MacArthur!!).

One really interesting thing about this building is that there is this HUGE gold ball in the center of the building (I think it was on the 91st floor) that stabilizes the entire skyscraper. When the wind blows the building, this ball makes sure it doesn't topple over - isn't that crazy? It kind of freaked me out. What if the huge wire cables holding it up snapped? We'd be crushed - literally!

After 101, we headed to the Shilin Night Market. Sharyl met up with us there and it was really neat! Night markets are really big in Taiwan - everyone goes to them. There are vendors everywhere with food, clothes, shoes and almost anything else you can imagine. I tried the famous black pearl milk tea here and it was really pretty good. It was black tea w/ milk and these little black tapioca balls. The weirdest part was chewing something while drinking - not something I'm really used to. I also tried dumplings and flat bread which were both really good. We went over to the food market area and it was pretty crazy! The smells were not so good - stinky tofu, oyster omelets and lots of other things. As you can see, this was a day full of new experiences - very different, but all so fun!