On Tuesday night Samuel and Christine Senior took us to a night market in Taipei that recently set up to sell traditional Chinese New Year snacks. The Chinese New Year is on February 13th this year and already we've noticed that most businesses, tourist sites, buses and trains have become so much busier than usual. I'm scared to see what it will be like next week when winter school is finished! Samuel and Christine said that the market we visited runs for about 2 weeks and they visit it every year. There were a few handicraft vendors but 99% of the stuff sold here is food. The market sprawls over the course of two blocks and it takes a good 45 minutes to walk from one end to the other with the slow-moving crowds and vendors constantly stopping you to offer samples of their snacks.
The vendors were really pushy with their products and guess what? They all suddenly know English when they want to sell you something. After sampling a candy at the beginning of the market Mel told a seller that "maybe" she'd be back to buy and he said "maybe is always lie"! At the end of the evening she did go back to buy and when confronted about his lying accusations he gave us hugs and exclaimed that he loves foreigners. I told him that we love candy. Samuel said that most of the vendors are University students working for money on their winter vacations. They work hard for the money!
The snacks get very repetitive before long. Booths of the same candy, juice, porridge, jerky, nougat, dried squid, dried fruits, dried veggies, dried everything get very predictable after awhile but I have to say that when I left I felt full after being fed so many samples, and all I bought was a single $20NT piece of nougat. I highly recommend this market as a low-cost dining option.
Today we went to Jinguashi to visit a Gold Ecological Park. Jinguashi was once a booming gold and copper mining town but the resources have long since been depleted. The old mining area has been turned into a touristy museum. I still don't know what possessed us to go to Jinguashi today because we knew it was going to rain, we knew it wasn't a good day to visit, but nobody could think of anything better to do today so off we went. And dude, it poured the whole time. Oh- and also, we didn't see any gold.
We had our temperatures checked before we were admitted to a museum the size of a small hallway, and after our lack of H1N1 was verified, we were given stamps of approval. This has got to be the last place in the country still checking temperatures because they stopped doing this everywhere else last November.
A Japanese style home built for a member of the royal family who was supposed to visit the area but then never did. Too bad, because they even built a mini golf course for him!
The view, normally pretty amazing according to Nareesa (who'd been here before), left a little something to be desired today.
We started climbing up this ominous looking set of stairs towards a temple, but as we walked up the stairs they got more and more "rugged" looking and we convinced Nareesa to let us go back down the hill.
Our admission to the park was free but we opted to pay $50NT for a tour of one of the old gold mines and we were provided with gorgeous blue hats to wear under our helmets. Fun fact: In 1942, the Japanese brought POWs here from various parts of Southeast Asia and they were forced to work in the cooper mine as slaves, digging the ore in the lowest depths of the mine where the temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius, with little food or rest. There was a POW shrine at the park that I wanted to visit, but we didn't get a chance to see it because the rain picked up and we were all soaked.
In the mine! Our mine tour lasted approximately 3 minutes.
A miner plugs his ears while waiting for the dynamite to explode.
The highlight of the visit, for me, was when we found a coffee shop! While we huddled around our warm drinks and played with a hungry (but very picky) dog the sky seemed to open up and it poured down heavier than ever. We had mainly come to see a gold waterfall but when we were told we had to take a bus to see it and the bus only ran once an hour we decided to call it a day and head back home. We were soaked. We were going to travel all the way to Taipei Main Station but after more than an hour on the bus my bladder got the best of me and I forced us all to get off at Zhongxiao Fuxing so I could use the washroom. Luckily, this placed us within walking distance of Dean & Deluca, which saved the day with delicious coffee. A laptop update- we called Acer today and the official diagnosis is that our motherboard is fried, we've lost everything on the hard drive (my pictures!), and a new motherboard will cost $5100NT ($150/CAN) and will take 2-3 days. Surely this will be the longest 2-3 days of life because the weather forecast predicts rain, rain, rain and our cable here is horrible! I actually forgot that we even had cable until our computer died. So far tomorrow's plans include waiting at home until 6:30 so we can take our garbage out... and that's it. Expect some crazy blogging about that hot event :P
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