Day 2

Ni Hao,

Today ended up being a much better day. We had a great time sightseeing and coming home to a nice and comfortable hotel made up for everything. We ventured on the subway to the world's tallest building Taipei 101. Of course with the weather being overcast and rainy we got to the top and saw mostly fog. The incredible thing was the bottom of this building is a huge shopping mall with more and nicer stores than the new northpark has. It was incredible and I was totally wishing that I could have taken advantage of the shopping opportunity. It cost about $10 each for us to go to the observatory and they are very proud of their fastest elevator in the world. We went from floor 5 to 89 in 37 seconds. After checking out Taipei from the observatory we headed to one of the largest food courts I've ever seen. It took Will and I about 30 minutes to walk around and decide what we wanted.

Will as a close resemblance to Buddha. Taipei 101 behind us

We next went to Sun Yat-Sen Memorial and it was pretty cool but we were both kind of tired and we had a big night ahead of us.

View from Taipei 101. Will in front of Sun Yat-Sen Memorial

After taking a nap we headed back out and went to the Lungshan Temple. We walked in and there were people everywhere doing all sorts of prayer acts, walking around with incense, and offering food and flowers to the Gods. We walked all around and one of the most interesting things we saw was people bending down and praying and then dropping these half moon shapes on the floor. It looked like the were playing a dice game with their prayers.

Lungshan Temple

From the Temple we headed to Snake Alley, one of the night markets. Will was really excited because he had read that you can get incredible foot massages and you can watch a snake eat a rabbit or mouse right in front of you. We headed down the market and saw foot massage parlors everywhere. We walked by one place and a man came up to us and was very insistent that his massage place was the best and that they were the only certified people in the area. We headed on in and for a little more than $15 each we got a 30 minute foot massage. Now understand this wasn't some relaxing foot massage. I was in pain most of the time, and as Will said between laughs and screams this is good pain and it was. The point of these massages is that there are different places all over your feet that can cure all areas of your body, from your sinus, to your sore muscles, to even you genital regions. From there we ventured on down the road and saw a man with one of the biggest snakes I've ever seen just hanging out next to this guy. He was trying to get Will to come in and have some snake soup. We thought about it and decided that might not be the best thing for our stomach. We walked a little further and there was a man taming two cobras. It was quite and experience. We ended up finding this hibachi grill street vendor and for about $10 we each had dinner and large Taiwan beers which were about the size of 40s.

We're up again and about to head out to the zoo, the Grand Hotel, and Chang Kai-Shek memorial. Hope you all are doing well. We head to Ho\ng Kong tomorrow so our next post will probably be from there.