A Message from Pei- TALLL BUILDING

Today was supposed to be rainy BUT instead it was sunny and over 70 degrees. We finally made it to the Taipei 101 building. It is very tall, but not as wide as most buildings. In the center of the building there is a damper system which is comprised of many pillars and one HUGE "damper baby" Damper Baby is 660 ton steel weight which hangs in the center of the building to help absorb the sway of the building. They are really proud of the damper giving it a super hero character named Damper Baby. They even display the Damper. We EVEN got our picture taken with the damper. The viewing area for the damper is on floor 88. To get up there you take a superfast elevator. It was like half a minute to go from the 5th floor to the 89th. Our ears were popping!

On floor 89 there is an observation area which is all enclosed and has a shopping area. They had a display of the Taipei 101 and Marcus showed me where we were at in the building. Then we got to look ou the windows. You could see the WHOLE city. Even though there was a little bit of fog you could still see the mountains in the distance. The entire building has windows all around it. Heather and Marcus wondered how they cleaned the windows on the building. Marcus said they might have a system for it and that sound like a good idea. Then we saw these guys. Heather decided that she doesn't do windows! I don't think any of us wanted to volunteer to be part of the window cleaning crew. To get to the outside viewing area you climb a set of stairs. We went up three flights of stairs to reach the 91st floor. Then we got to go out side to look around. The view was awesome. The sun was nice and warm but it was still windy.

After we looked around we went back and saw a video about the building being built. The end of the video had a section on the 2008 new year celebration where they shot fireworks off of the building. That was sooo cool! Before we went down, we sat at a little table and had some ice cream- Marcus had mint chocolate chip (Michael's favorite, boy I can't wait to meet him). Then we got BACK on the super fast elevator and shot back down to the shopping mall that is in the first several floors of the building. There was a McDonalds there and we got French Fries (mmmmm yummy) We also got Michael a present, but I can't tell you what it is. What a fun day!