Waiting to check in to Tiger Airways.
We had Mac breakfast at T2!
Soon, it was time for departure. Goodbye everyone!
Woody wanted to get his MCM stuff inside T2, and it was a pretty mad rush since we only had like less than 20 minutes till the flight takes off. He purchased his stuff and went RUNNING to our boarding gate. Is there a time that I can finally not run for my flight? We were the last to board, and the Pinoy lady staff was grumbling at us while tearing our flight tickets. It got Woody into a bad mood :/
Because we were so tired, we fell asleep for more than half the time we were on board the plane. The awkward sleeping positions made my neck ache and cramp badly. Sigh.
Merry Christmas from Taipei!!
I was very fascinated by how they have tea eggs boiling in stew pots, several loklok items, onigiri and even hot can drinks!
Me in their convenience store heaven, holding milk and custard puddings that I wanted to try!
We bought bus tickets from Kuo-Kuang Bus Company to Taipei Main Station, only to find out that there’s another bus company offering rides to ZhongXiao East Station, which is even nearer to our hotel destination.
Let’s fly away…
Got a really kind girl to help us take a picture, she was telling me to be careful as she passed us back the camera. Taiwanese people are all so nice!
Weee, the bus is here!!! There was a space below the bus to load our luggage.
Excited max!!!!
Slept through the bus journey and arrived at Taipei Main Station! Topping up our EasyCard.
Our special EasyCard from Taiwan Association! :)
Train stations were always crowded, like in Singapore.
Walking towards our hotel, FX Hotel. It’s located at 131 Nanjing East Road, and the nearest MRT is none other than Nanjing East Road. It’s right next to Westin Taipei!
The pretty lobby, not bad for a boutique hotel.
I guess I should have taken pictures of the room, but uhmmm…
Sooo crowded at Zhongxiao East Station, it was an interchange for blue and brown lines. It was 6PM by then.
Taking the blue line towards YongNing to Ximen Station.
We are at Ximending!! This was taken at 6:18PM, but the whole sky has already turned dark! The sun sets very fast in Taipei.. So as we shop and shop, we tend to think oh no it’s quite late already, probably like 10PM? And it’s only 8! What a good feeling. But the thing is, I tend to feel more sleepy earlier….because the sky….is so dark.
We had street snacks for dinner. This is the potato cheese stall.
The mochi boys grilling their stuff.
The potato cheese was okay, it’s my first time seeing a vendor giving out so much of cheese. It would have been nicer if the cheese was warmer. The potato was stuffed with lotsa ingredients though!
Superrrr good grilled mochi! I regret not being able to try the matcha flavored one, but the one we had was condensed milk and cheese. Condensed milk one was really good!
Happy Harry Potter.
We managed to chance upon this store at XMD, it has really nice guy stuff. As you can see, Woody spent quite a bit here and couldn’t stop raving about it. It was prolly equivalent to his kind of heaven.
I can only help him hold his coat and entertain myself while he shops!
This poor poodle was shivering throughout. Like being really shaky. I had no idea why… Taiwanese people are such dog lovers. They bring their dogs EVERYWHERE they go to and they like to dress up their dogs. It’s quite cute and heartwarming to see such a pet-loving society. Cats were pretty rare there though.
Buying the frog egg drinks! Nothing to be afraid of, it’s just pearls…
The highly-raved about Ah Chung Mian Xian. Don’t see the rave about it when I ate it… only to come back to Singapore and find out that we should have added pig intestines, chilli and vinegar. Now I wanna go back to give it a second chance again!
The shop selling all kinds of stuffed toys. They have a huge ass bear there, but we weren’t allowed any pictures.
UNIQLO at XMD!
Random dogs, one of it kept smelling the ass of the other one and that dog got really irritated. Can’t remember which one though, haha.
Queuing for white bittergourd juice! It’s not bitter because they added honey.
Buying the literally translated Bursting Egg Cake.
Happy that we tried lotsa street snacks!
Touristy shot with XMD banner. If you look close enough at the right photo, there’s a car driving up to us! It was quite a scary experience. Cars and scooters are everywhere in XMD streets, especially scooters because that’s a really common form of transport in Taiwan. We had to always be on our guard when walking on the streets!
We met a really huge and cute golden retriever and he sits/lays at the entrance of the eatery shop and garners quite a bit of attention because he is so HUGE. We started patting it and taking pictures with it and everyone else followed suit..
At about 9 plus 10pm, all the illegal street vendors start pushing their carts out and laying their ware on the floor to sell. Once they have news of the police coming their way, they will make a beeline for the nearest back alley to hide there so they won’t get caught. It’s quite a sight. There was once the police really came and before that, Woody and I were browsing through some stuff at the street side. In a flash, the stall vendors simply kept all their goods and ran away. Like….really ran away and left us quite astonished with the speed.
Love this candied strawberry stick!!
Such shops with the claw machines are very common and popular in Taipei, we also joined in the fun and spent quite a bit on it. Each turn costs NT$10, which is around SGD$0.40. The game is really quite addictive because the toys are always placed near to the hole to drop out from.
We caught this LINE bunny!!!
Most shops in XMD closes around 11PM, so we settled down at an aquarium-themed café to chill the night away.
These are all the toys we caught/bought!
We had a chicken cutlet with a weird sauce (like a mix of soy bean paste and chilli paste), along with a pot of honey red tea and another of honey green tea. We had two because he couldn’t make up his mind which to order so we managed to try both..
LOL!
So this marks the end of our first day in Taiwan, as we cabbed back to the comfy hotel and slept right after that. The Christmas spirit in Taiwan is not very obvious because there were barely any Christmas decorations around. Maybe the mall areas will have more. Nonetheless, it was a good experience to finally step foot onto XMD, Taiwan’s version of Japan’s Shibuya. I think there were a lot of treasures for one to dig in XMD. But sadly, it was the winter season and all the clothes sold were knit wear, most of the knit wear were even fleece lined. The apparel were not cheap, some of them you can even get in Singapore at a lower price! That’s why I didn’t quite buy a lot. We spent a lot on food though!! The street snacks were all nice and the drinks all looked very tempting as well.. Next up will be Taiwan Travelogue Day 2!
