Dihua Market, Jianan, & Shilin Night Market, Taiwan

Friday January 13, 2012

Jackie took Joe to Dihau Street Market which is several blocks long. It is typically crazy before the Lunar New Year since the area is considered Taipei’s best for traditional New Year foods, party supplies and gifts of all kinds. Many merchants are offering free samples of their goods to all passers-by.

Several times Jackie was greeted with “Hello! Welcome to Taiwan! Happy New Year!” and had some foreign food shoved in her face. Both of us were a little overwhelmed.

There were barrels and barrels of candy.

Jackie had to keep her distance from the tall bags of nuts. She might die if these fell on her due to her allergy!

There was also a lot of dried food.

Next we rode the metro over to Jianan where the Miramar Entertainment area is and the large ferris wheel.

The Jianan metro station is pretty cool too.

Jackie’s main reason for heading here was to find Morphosis’ ASE Design Center built in 1997 in Taipei. Nowhere on the internet could she find the address for this building. She figured the link to a map on Morphosis’ website has got to be accurate enough, so up we go down a residential street. Either the building no longer exists or Morphosis can’t even accurately locate the site of a building they designed! Thom Mayne may be getting a very irate email from a young architecture admirer who was thankful she didn’t drag her aging father-in-law on this trek but upset that the location of such a highly acclaimed building cannot be found.

We gave up and took the long route on the metro to the Shilin Night Market. We went east on the brown line and saw the northeastern part of Taipei. Dahu Lake in the Neihu district looked cool and a lot of new construction around Nangang Exhibition Center and Academia Sinica.

We finally made it to the Shilin Night Market. This time we went straight downstairs to the new food court. There was a long line for this large fried chicken stand which we knew we just had to have.

We had roasted chicken buttocks and tempura from a street vendor.

This was a great last night in Taiwan, but we were ready to be home.

Saturday, January 14, 2012, we had an early flight home. Even with the long flight, we still arrived in Seattle on Saturday morning due to the time change (15 hour difference between Seattle and Taiwan, 12 hour from east coast and Taiwan). I watched a few more movies: The Help (at least the first ¾ on the first flight), the final minutes of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow Part 2, Crazy, Stupid, Love, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Horrible Bosses. I was able to sleep the last 3.5 hours of the flight, but Joe couldn’t sleep at all. We picked up our bags and made it through customs (even with food stuffs in our additional checked bag for the flight home). We rode the light rail from the airport into downtown Seattle. Coming into town on a Saturday morning didn’t give us a clear direct route to our house. We waited 10 minutes in windy downtown waiting for a bus to Lynnwood. We then waited 15 minutes at that park and ride for a local bus. After another 10 minute wait in the cold for a second local bus, we reached the closest bus stop to the house, .7mi away. As we departed the bus at 11am, the falling rain began to turn into sleet as we walked home! By the time we were in the house we were frozen and soaking wet. We were out the door shortly to pick up Chance from the vet where it was now snowing huge flakes! Welcome to the convergence zone!