We started our day off by eating something small from Family Mart (one of the thousand 24 hour convenience stores here) for breakfast and heading to Dihua street using the MRT (metro).
Using the metro here is very easy. I would recommend buying an Easy Card or an IPass (as we did). These are plastic cards or tokens, that you can top up with money and then pay contactless at the metro, buses, local trains or even in some shops (e.g. 7 Eleven (another convenience store)). We bought our IPass right at the airport, together with a ticket for using the airport MRT line. Our Token is Stuart from the Minions :)
Dihua street is an old commercial street where medical herbs, tea, fabrics, incense materials and other stuff are sold. The smells are intense and delicious.
We bought a small sweet (Chelun Bing; wheel cake) from a street stand, filled with purple sweet potato which was delicious and not too sweet.
From Dihua Street we made our way through small alleyways to the Confucius temple. I really like the temple with its bright colors and I love that there are many information boards about Confucianism, so that you can learn a little bit about it when visiting.
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| Those who read my previous blog on Taiwan might recognize these Confucius figures :) |
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| On the day of our visit there were planes flying pretty low over the temple and the surrounding area. |
Right around the corner of the street there is the Dalongdong Baoan Temple which is a Taiwanese folk religion temple which has very intricate wood carvings all over.
As a snack we opted for some dumplings filled with pork, cabbage or some green vegetable and some bubble tea. (no photos taken, sorry :))
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| Baoan Temple Garden |
In order to get there you have to cross Keelung river which as a pedestrian is not that easy. But there is one bridge where you can also cross as a pedestrian, which is Chengde bridge. Not far from the bridge you will find the start of the Jiantanshan Trail. From there always follow the signs for the plane viewing spot, or long trail (or something like that), you won't find signs for Laodifang.
One thing about hiking trails in Taiwan you should know: they are always (or as far as I know) paved and consist of a lot of steps. So don't expect earthy trails as the ones in Europe and be prepared for many steps.
The walk was beautiful although at the beginning of the trail the mood was set by many small places where people were singing karaoke... :D
Further up you couldn't hear them anymore.
The views were stunning with Taipei 101 in the background and Songshan Airport.
After taking lots of photos we decided to go to the nearby Shilin Night Market for dinner and we absolutely loved it!
I was a bit worried that it would be difficult to order/communicate but they are quite used to seeing foreigners and speak a little English or have English menus so that you can order.
I can only recommend you trying Oyster Omelette, Taiwanese fried chicken and Stinky Tofu! Yes, stinky tofu. Although the smell of it is quite bad... When JJ first smelled it, and I said 'Oh,there is some stinky tofu being sold somewhere near' he replied 'I though someone had vomited'. ><
But if you can get over the smell it doesn't taste bad and I think you should try it at least one. It is not our favorite kind of food, and we will probably not eat it again, but it's an experience.
As a drink I can recommend you try Papaya Milk. It's so refreshing.
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| Oyster Omelette |
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| The infamous stinky tofu |
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| fried chicken |
During the evening we made reservations for some trains we want to take during our trip. One of the being the Alishan Forest Railway, which is not that easy to book and is booked out fast (that's why we only have tickets for our return journey from Alishan back down the mountain. The journey up was already booked out.). If you want more information on how to book the train write a comment and I will write a separate blog entry for booking trains. We also don't know if our journey back to Taipei at the end of our trip will go smoothly since the booking online always tells us that there are no tickets available but the people at the TRA train stations can't help us yet since they can only see the tickets 1.5 weeks in advance or something like that, so we have to go back the day after tomorrow... We hope we will be able to get some tickets. Apart from those two trains we had no problem making online reservations and checking the timetables for all the other trains.
We'll see how it goes ;)
Until tomorrow!
Pia
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