Touring, Day 1

We ended up doing a little more walking around the city today than we'd originally anticipated, but had a great time "seeing the sights."

We started by heading East out of the Landis Hotel and went to the Xingtian Temple, where the smell of incense sort of hit you when you were a block away. With the holiday today, there were many people coming to have themselves and/or their children blessed at the temple. This picture is our best attempt to capture the scale of the number of people there.

We then walked north to the Xinsheng and Zhongshan Arts Parks. On our way, we spotted this Taiwanese Fire Station. (Picture included for Jeremy's godson, who LOVES Fire Trucks.)

Our original plan had been to go to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which is a really cool piece of architecture, and had some interesting sculpture surrounding it, like the one shown below. However, when we got there, we decided we'd rather keep walking so we bypassed the Museum.

Instead, we headed to The Grand Hotel, Taipei's first 5-Star hotel. The building itself was built to resemble a traditional Chinese Imperial Palace, and the scope of it is huge! The flower arrangement in the lobby must have been 5 - 6 feet tall in and of itself. We had snacks at the coffee shop in the hotel before deciding that we were up for a trip to the Shinlin Night Market.

As you can tell form the picture below, the "Night Market" also operates during the day, and they have Bubble Tea! Due to an unfortunate ordering mistake, Jeremy only got milk tea -- no tapioca bubbles for him today. However, he's learned his lesson and is prepared to do better tomorrow. (He also reminds me that if he has to get addicted to something here in Taiwan, better that it's the treat that costs about $1 per serving. I suppose he's onto something there....)