clouds and rainbows

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Taiwan Trip 2nd Day: Taichung

This time we ventured out of Taipei, took the High Speed Rail (HSR) to Taichung. The HSR tickets weren't cheap.. Return trip tickets were priced around SGD70 per pax. Upon reaching Taichung, we wanted to tour Sun Moon Lake ourselves, but we reached Taichung past noon which was already quite late to complete a comprehensive tour of the entire Sun Moon Lake. So we took the "taxi tour" which brought us to the major tourist spots surrounding the lake. Luckily we did not "topo" on our own because it was a wkday so it was like a dead town with no public buses in view, and it rained heavily halfway through the tour! The driver was so nice to lend us his umbrella for our boat tour. But the tour is quite pricey (around SGD 145 for the tour, so if more ppl it'll be cheaper after dividing across).

Our HSR tickets

Very comfy and spacious cabins

View along the route

Finally arrived after an hr ride

The HSR looks like the bullet train

Larling drawing out his invisible sword

On the taxi!

First stop: That's a church made of paper, flown in from Japan, according to the driver

Peacock garden

The peacocks were suppose to run freely behind but they were kept indoors due to rain

Dazhuhu Trail

Panaromic view

The lake is running out of water.

Cable car station

We didn't take the cable car as we are short of time

Boat tour!

This boat looks so sweet in pink!

Great for weddings

We docked at Shueishe Harbour before moving off.

Gloomy skies..

And sure enough when we reached the next Xuanguang harbour, it poured literally.

And with the strong winds, we were drenched head to toe.

The boat sent us back to Itashao harbour which we boarded at the start and waited for the driver to bring us to the next destination..

Wenwu Temple.

The central hall is devoted to Guan Gong (God of War) and Yue Fei (Warrior God), while the rear and front hall is devoted to Confucious and his disciples, thus the name Wenwu

It's a very beautiful temple

Misty skies after the rain

I love this shot

The temple has 2 such stone fire lions guarding at the front

Wild boar sausages cooked on hot stone.

yummay

Han Bi hotel.. Chiang Kai Shek's fav stayover place.

The driver told us the strip of yellow bar you see in the pic is made of gold, even their toilet bowls are made of gold! How true we don't really know

I believe this statue should be Chiang Kai Shek

Jiji train station.

Larling's cam battery ran flat after this pic

I have my iPhone cam!

After Sun Moon Lake tour, it was a long ride to Fengjia Night Market.

Along the way, the driver even brought to buy Taichung's famous 太阳饼.

Fengjia Night market wasn't as bustling as Shilin night market

Fortunate Fengjia Uni students who have a night market right at their doorstep

everyday can eat 鸡排葱油饼泡泡奶茶!

Next: Day 3 Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall + Shilin

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