Taiwan Trip 1st Day: Ximending

I haven't been blogging for quite a while.. My most supportive fan, larling asked why the Taiwan trip is not blogged yet. And the zoo trip, meetups with my DT lovelies are still waiting to be blogged as well. It's not that I don't wanna write, but the uploading of photos into Blogger really takes a super long time.

Anyway here's Day 1 of our Taiwan trip:
First thought when we arrived in Taiwan: Why is the weather hotter than Spore's?! The weather in May is supposed to be air-con temp. Their weather is even more erratic than ours; it was scorching hot the first day, subsequent days it turned much cooler and on our last day, strong typhoon winds threatened to blow us away.

Upon arrival, we took the Freego bus to our hotel. Very cheap transporatation to the hotel (2pax @ NTD 280), but midway we need to change to another smaller bus. And the bus doesn't drop us directly outside our hotel, so we dragged our luggage all the way from the opposite street. Luckily on the last day we decided to take the hotel transportation as the winds were very strong and we had more barang with us compared to the first day.

At Changi Airport T1

Arrived at Taoyuan Airport after 5 hrs



Onboard Freego bus

All seats are business-class

While waiting for more ppl to board the bus, I took a pic of the empty bus

Aftre an hr ride, we arrived at our hotel, CityInn Plus.

It's new boutique hotel near Ximending so we decided to give it a try.

Scooters are the best mode of short-distance transportation for Taiwanese

On the crowded streets of Ximending

Our lunch at Ah Zong mian xian.

It's a must-have when you come to Taiwan

I love the mian xian, but not the "dua deng" i.e big intestines as I find it too rubberish to chew and swallow

Here's our room:

Very very teeny space, with only enough area to put a queen-sized bed and dressing table. There wasn't any wardrobe at all! That was our first time staying in a hotel with such small space

Yet the toilet is ultra huge.. do they expect us to sleep in the toilet?

Recently Xiao Zhu opened his new 4-storey store at Ximending.

So we went to check it out. It was quite disappointing.

Only the first two levels are accessible to public, L3 and L4 is for his own private use.

His merchandise doesn't have the unique flavour to showcase his style, rather it's just like a normal shop selling youngsters clothes and bags.

Dinner's at Modern Toilet Restaurant. This time we cannot miss it again.

The food and ambience here is much better than the HK franchise.

Nice decor greeted us when we stepped in

Shitty lamp overhead

Their food is seriously quite delicious, that's the reason why such a novelty themed restaurant is able to survive till now


The curry beef is quite good

Ice-cream sorbet shaped like a shit

Yummy

After dinner we walked around searching for famous Snow King Ice-Cream shop but we stumbled upon this 4-level shop selling cutesy stuff. So we gave up on the search and went shopping instead!

The Leaning Tower of Pisa in paper

They have the table-size as well

Paper ball origami

I bought one home to assemble, but the electrical plug for the light turned out to be Taiwan's two straight pins instead of our round ones. -_-


This is the name of the shop.




Purchases from the shop..

I think I spent 60 bucks there.

Horsecarriage in wood.

Purchases from the toilet-restaurant. HK's branch should sell these!


Uber cute straws

Next up: Day 2 Taichung Sun Moon Lake

Larling's new cam

Larling's new cam came in just in time for our Taiwan trip next wk.. Heard that this cam had limited stock in Singapore due to the Tsunami disaster in Japan, now the prices have climbed 20% higher. I told him to sell off for a good profit, but the storeowner which larling sold his Nikon D5000 to said the second batch of Fujifilm X100 from Japan might contain radiation. I found it quite amusing at first, but it might be true. So better keep this precious little vintage gadget.

Very vintage-looking Fuji X100

But performance wise is definitely comparable or even better than a SLR

It's a SLR packed into a compact camera

Testing the Panaromic function

Damn cool.. can capture 180 degrees of his house view.

On the way to Sunshine Plaza to sell the D5000.

I thought it was quite a waste to sell the DSLR, but the quality of pics from X100 turned out to be much superior that the DSLR.

Waiting for Gong Cha at PS.

Back at home playing with the cam..
Mickey mouse has only four fingers

Windmill souvenir from larling's sis in Holland

Taken using a larger f-number of 5.6

This was taken using f-number 2.8

Smaller f-number gives shorter depth of field that's why the Apple carebear looks less focused in this photo.

Jolin's concert on Polling Day

What could be more exciting than the Polling results? It's gotta be Jolin's MYSELF concert! I was so worried that her concert tickets might sold out like Jay's concert, so we bought the tickets super early even before the sale of tickets was released to public. With OCBC Titanium credit card, you'll get such privileges. Our $168 was every cent well-spent. Her dance moves are really impressive, even though we were seated quite a distance from the stage, we could see the strength and effort in her moves. Her singing didn't fray or weaken from her dancing, and she didn't seem tired at all from all the shaking and jumping. Her stamina is damn amazing, considering that her dance songs made up 80% of the entire 2.5hr concert. Looking at the hard work she've done to improve herself, she've earned my love and respect.

It was held at National indoor stadium

All we had for keepsake from the concert is this paper fan

There wasn't any merchandise booth selling her souvenirs..
It's like a no frills concert, no posters of her, we even wondered if we went to the right place for the concert. Haha

We didn't bring our cameras as the Sistic website says no photography or videography allowed.

But we were cheated.

The entire stadium brought cameras and even SLRs lor.

So the photos here were all taken by my iphone

The concert finally started after 30mins of DJ-spinning music
Singapore's stage seems small as compared to Taiwan's 小巨蛋




Normally do you bring your own lightsticks to concerts or do they actually sell it at the concert? cos we noticed not alot of ppl bring their own lightsticks as the place was dark with countable lightsticks. Jolin even commented why nobody brought lightsticks.
Luckily larling brought his army lightsticks! see we're so supportive. Haha

End of concert

Some of her new songs that I like..

Her new album Myself is really not bad..