Queen For A Year: Taiwan - "Touch Your Heart"

The tourism slogan for Taiwan is "Touch Your Heart". I adore Taiwan and so I love the slogan, too, for Taiwan did indeed touch my heart. I had the best time and made wonderful memories to last me a lifetime. It was a time of firsts for me: I went snorkling for the first time, rode a moped for the first time and tried some strange and exotic foods like frogs and snake soup.

I took a ton of pictures too many to post today so I decided to talk about my first three days in Taiwan this time and next week I will post more pictures and finish with the rest of my vacation in Taiwan.

Here is a sign outside a restaurant with the "Taiwan - Touch Your Heart" slogan on it. These signs are everywhere in the tourist areas.

We arrived at CKS: Chang Kai Shei Airport [the International Airport in Taipei] just before lunch on Tuesday, October 3rd. We headed for the information booth and got them to book a hotel for us. And found out that we could take the airport bus to the Main Train Station in Taipei and that our hotel was literally next door. We stayed at the Cosmos Hotel and it was so close to the train station. The MRT [the subway system in Taipei] is under the train station, too, so it proved to be a most convenient location. I took this picture of the train station from out hotel window.

We got off the airport bus to the side of the Main Train Station in Taipei. There were lines of these yellow taxi cabs watching us hoping for a fare but alas they were out of luck since our hotel was next door.

Walking through the Taipei Train Station at 1:03 pm and seeing only a handful of people was so shocking to me after the crowds of people in Korea that I stopped to take a picture and admire the peace and quiet. I'm glad I took this picture as I like the way the light falls in this image.

This is a picture of our hotel room at the Cosmos Hotel. It was clean and bright and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a convenient place to stay in Taipei.

I had been warned by one of my blog readers to take "moped repellent" to Taiwan. I thought he was exagerating but I found out that he wasn't. These mopeds are everywhere. I still didn't find them as reckless as the "autobi" drivers in Korea as for the most part in Taiwan or at least Taipei the mopeds seemed to drive on the roads and not on the sidewalks.

Our first night in Taipei we went to "Very Thai" a Thai restaurant I had read about in my Lonely Planet book. It was great. It was open until 2 am and in fact the later we stayed the busier it got.

"Ray" read the menu and decided we needed to try the frogs. We got the spicy ones knowing that after more than 3 years of eating Korean food we could handle spicy food and figuring that the fried frogs would be just too much like chicken. The spicy ones were good - a little boney but good.

The next afternoon we were off to the Sung Shan [the Domestic Airport in Taipei] to fly to Taitung.

Taintung is a smaller city to the South East of Taiwan. The reason we headed for it is that is is the gateway to Green Island. It is, also, the gateway for Orchid [Lanyu] Island - an area where most of the aborginals in Taiwan still live. Taitung celebrates is aborginal culture as you can see even in the telephone booth at the airport.

A picture outside the Taitung Airport. As you can see it is quite a small airport.

A fountain outside the airport.

The gift shop outside the Taitung airport.

The gift shop sells a lot of aborginal beadwork. It reminds me of the native Canadian beadwork.

The Tourist Information Center at the airport was able to not only book as a hotel in the nearby area of Chihpen [ a resort area famous for it's hot spring] but was able to arrange for our hotel to come and pick us up at the airport. We stayed at the Chihpen Hotel. This is a picture of the hot pools that I took from our hotel room window.

That night while "Ray" and I were taking a soak in the hot pools were looked up at the light fixture above us and saw a lizard. I guess he was drawn to the heat of the light.

I was amazed by the tall palm trees in the Chihpen area. It was so exotic looking.

We took a walk before dinner and found this waterfall. It was beautiful and so natural. Unfortunately, the light was fading and to get enough light I had to use a long exposure and I guess I jiggled a tiny bit and slightly blurred the picture. Darn it!