Catching up

Yesterday (Sunday) was a busy day. I had class again, and so had to be out the door at 8:30am to hop on the MRT from our station (Nanjing Rd. East) one stop on the Muzha line to the Zhongxiao Fuxing station, with about a 10 minute walk from there to the office where my class is being taught. Class went well, and for lunch we all went out to another local little restaurant. The students ordered for me fish ball soup, as well as a spicy beef and noodles dish. Excellent food all around. I did ask for a Coke -- I still need my cold caffeine each day.
While I was in class, Mom spent a little time exploring around our hotel (Howard Garden Suites). She wandered up and down Changchun Road, and found several little hotspots, including a Starbucks, where I think she spent a little time over coffee and the newspaper.
In the evening, our plan had been to go to a Night Market that I have never been to before -- the Raohe Street Night Market.  One of my students had recommended it, and so I was looking forward to something new. I gave the sheet of paper the student had written the name on to the person at the front desk of our hotel so that she could write it out on a card for the taxi driver. We hopped in a cab, and were on our way. But when we were dropped off, we discovered that we had been delivered instead to the Shihlin Night Market -- a big, famous market, but not the one that we had intended to go to. We decided to stay, though, and to explore it.

Outside the Shihlin Night Market

Mom and I wandered around, and found many wonderful things that somehow we did not need to purchase. We actually did find some fun things, including some little jade bracelets that we will give to the kids in Heather's Sunday School class, and a watch for me (I always love to get a very good looking stunningly cheap knock-off watch when I travel). We also wandered through all the food places -- all of those food odors mixing together don't always combine to create something wonderful, but we did find a lot of interesting things to look at, including a booth that had a variety of types of snakes in cages, though we didn't see any of them being turned into something to eat. I did find something that looked good -- it's essentially a potato that has been cut into a spiral that is then fried into a lengthy potato chip. It looked good, so I asked for one -- or at least, I thought I did. I had pointed to what I intended to get, but ended up with something entirely different. What I got was more like a fried triangle with something stuffed inside -- I have absolutely no idea what it was, but it was tasty! Mom wasn't sure that she would have gone for that -- she wants to know what she's eating. I suggested that sometimes, maybe you don't want to know!

91 floors up, and outside!

Today, we thought about going to the National Palace Museum, because it looked a bit overcast. But when we were through with breakfast, the sky was nice and clear, and we decided that it would be a good day to go to Taipei 101 instead. Taipei 101 used to be the tallest building in the world, though it has now been significantly surpassed by a building in Dubai. But it is truly impressive, and we very much enjoyed it. You can go up to the 89th floor inside observation deck, and then we went up two more floors, to an external observation deck on the 91st floor. The elevator to get you up there is the fastest in the world, covering 84 floors in 37 seconds!  Your ears pop on the way up and back down, that's for sure.
After going through the observation deck way up high, we went back down to the lower floors, where there is a (very) upscale mall. We didn't feel the need to purchase anything at Coach or Burberry or any of the jewelry stores, but we did go to the food court down below. I had a Mos Burger -- sliced beef between two rice patties -- which is always one of my favorites. Mom was so excited when she spotted an Auntie Anne's pretzel shop! I wasn't able to persuade her to get the seaweed pretzel, though.

Yay! Auntie Anne's!

Wait a second... that's not what I wanted!

We will probably head back out for dinner a little later, and maybe make another try to go to the Raohe Night Market! But we'll figure that out a little later -- for now, we're just going to sit in the room, cool off, write a blog post, and watch some sumo wrestling on tv.