We spent most of this morning, organizing and repacking everything as for the next 18 days we will be living exclusively out of our suitcases because we will not be in each city for very long. It is bittersweet leaving Taipei as it is much more Americanized here even though we are still having issues with the language barrier and the food and etc. It is a good thing that we brought so many bars as I believe we will be eating them for the majority of our meals.
Mom and I decided to see the few things around our neighborhood here today as a way for us to get a little exercise and to make sure we saw everything we wanted to see. We began our little 5000 step walk by going into the 2-28 Peace Park across the street from our dorm and visited a few landmarks and walked by the Taipei National Museum, which was quite busy so we’ll go to next time we’re in Taipei!
We were shown a few days ago a nice place to go shopping so we thought we would check it out and maybe find some gifts for people. When we found the correct pedestrian street we began walking down it and found some clothing stores and many, many shoe stores. I have been looking for a black flat shoe that is light and cheap so that I can wear my sneakers walking and then change if we go some place nicer for dinner or etc, so mom and I began looking at the 50 shoe stores for a pair. After almost passing by all of them, one store caught our eyes and we saw some nice ballet flats that seemed perfect and were $195 NT, which is about $5 dollars US. Perfect price and if they get ruined, that is fine! Mom liked them so much that she got a pair too. We had to use our fingers to tell them what size shoe we were in European sizes rather than American sizes.
Mom also found a nice jade butterfly pendant thingy that she somehow talked to woman down to 50% off in sign language!
One of the reasons we went to this area too was because our hosts told us we could buy a tea set at a store near this area. The store was written in Chinese and so it proved to be very difficult for us to find. We tried to ask one shopkeeper who just pointed in a direction away from her and so we just started walking. We got to a large intersection and I saw some shops that said tea on them so we walked across the street and went into one of them. Ironically, the store we were looking for was on the third floor of the first tea store we entered. We got lucky! These tea sets were beautiful, one nicer than the next and somewhat affordable. We have seen many tea pots since we’ve been here and did not want to spend the money on a tea pot because they were about $90 dollars US each and that is insane. This store was much more affordable for a whole set and so we bought a nice one and a few other things and somehow managed to ask to ship them to the US and they are doing just that. There was absolutely no English spoken in this place at all… Actually it was the first time that we took out our Chinese/English dictionary to point at a word for them to understand us. It took a long time, but it worked!
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| The tea store. |
Our next stop was at a patisserie that smelled really good and I got a sandwich and mom found a loaf of French bread that she liked and that was our lunch. Then we walked home and relaxed a bit and continued to organize our things.
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