Monday, June 06, 2011

Taiwan Trip - Part 3

After the MRT ride, we begin long search for lunch in Taipei. After some searching, we've decided to settle it in a noodle shop nearby the MRT station and ordered some beef noodle (apparently beef noodle is all they can offer, just different soup inside).

Well I'm not sure that I'm just hungry of the stuff is really nice, but it was a great meal.

Owh and I missed some interesting facts about Taiwan drinks, they all have these 'sealed' packaging on the top which extremely nice for moving the drinks around without worrying it getting spilled.

Another thing is that some of the plastic topping have some lame quiz on it, which actually gave us a pretty good laugh at it.

So after the lunch we arrived at our next destination, the memorial monument of Sun Yat-sen. Apparently the size of monument is much smaller than the previous Jiang Jie Shi memorial monument we visited earlier. Maybe the Taiwan people are not a better fan of Sun Yat-sen?

A big water fountain outside doing some water-spraying shows.

More standing soldier here. With some luck, we manage to see the process of they swapping the soldier (which took 10 long minutes). Recorded the whole process down, couldn't feel my arms after recording the whole process...

Allow me to warn you, the video is frigging long... and you may yawn...

If you've watched the long and boring video, I went to check out the floor where they stand and - they really whack so hard that the floor cracks a hole!

Me and Mr.Sun! An honorable man he is, fighting his whole life for awakening the people to fight for liberty.

There's a mini museum in the monument, describing the histories of this great man.

Moving towards the next station, Taipei 101 tower. Since most of the buildings in Taiwan are not very tall, therefore it makes the Taipei 101 tower looks very 'outstandingly' tall.

The shopping mall below the tower, just another ordinary high class shopping mall, where thing things are just for your eye, not for your wallet.

Cheese :)

The entrance to go up the tower for visiting (located at floor 89). Gosh long queue!

The entrance ticket, cost 400 bucks (which is about 40 Ringgit here), frigging expensive imo, but since reach here already, might as well get in (and most of us regretted paying the 400 bucks later on).

This thing will be the tour guide when you're up there. There are many numbered pillars on the floor, so poke the numbers on the pillar where you standing and the machine will tell you what buildings you can see and some background of it.

The four direction, along with the other great buildings at these directions (of course you can't see them, the earth ain't flat).

Seriously, there's no 'special' views up there except buildings and hills. Talking about awesomeness, I think Google Earth did better.

The elevator that brought us up there, apparently it is the fastest elevator around (for the record), able to reach the speed of about 1km/min which is about 60km/hr, fast indeed.

The big ball that keeps the building structure stable, and absorb shakes when earthquakes. The ball is claimed to be the world's only stabilizing ball that open to public for viewing.

They've even made a cartoon version of the ball...

By the way, all the stuffs above are in the 89th floor, to return to the ground floor, the visitors need to go through 88th floor and take the elevator there to go down. The 88th floor are named the 'Ju Bao Lou' (聚宝楼)which literally translate as 'wealth-collector-floor'.

Well since they named it this way, of course you expect many expensive gems and stones lying around. However stuffs like this seems to be less attractive to students like myself, which actually yawn the way through all the shining stones.

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I have to admit, day-2 is a frigging long day, the night activities will be updated in part 4!