Taiwan days 16, 17, & 18

I hope I’m not skipping any days ! I haven’t been giving myself enough time to thoroughly describe everything but I think that’s a good thing – it shows I’m trying to stay present and explore here ! In any case…

DAY 16

I was super wishy-washy about whether I wanted to go to the National Palace Museum or not this day. You have to take a bus there, and I get nervous riding anything other than the metro and Uber here. Plus in my head, as with the other museums I went to, I thought I would go through it in about an hour (which I was horribly wrong about) But the museum looked quite magnificent, so I decided to try going in the afternoon.

I finally got there about 2:00 and decided to eat first, since I did not really have breakfast. The tea at the cafe was really good:

The museum entrance was really conveniently done – like the MRT. You can go to a machine to get tickets, and then you scan your ticket in like you would for the subway. In any case, I started looking through the museum around 2:30 pm, which I shortly realized was too late since the museum closes at 5:00, and it took me a little over an hour to go over the first floor – and there were 3 floors with 4 different gift shops – plus a garden outside ! I really wanted to get photos of the garden because I could tell it looked stunning, so I zipped through the rest of the museum taking photos when I could. Here are all of my museum photos (inside and outside):

Here are all my photos of the garden:

I hope to come again in the future, and I know now that the National Palace Museum is a DAY trip. ALSO! This was the first museum I got to use my Taiwan ID card for a discount, so that was nice.

When I got back to the city, even though I was tired, since I was near the red metro line, I decided to revisit two places on the red line – 淡水 and 士林夜市。淡水 is all the way at the END of the red line, and for some reason it was making me really nauseous getting there. In any case, there was a store I wanted to visit and I wanted to get there before it closed, so that was my first stop on the red line. I got this keychain that looked like JJ, and this specific postcard design that I really liked that I haven’t seen in any other bookstore or souvenir shops. I successfully got those items, and headed back south to 士林夜市 specifically for a peanut ice cream roll – something else I haven’t seen at any other night markets. I got one at the first stall I saw, and since I couldn’t eat it on the metro, I decided to walk around. I also got to finally play the taiko drum arcade game which is probably my favorite one at this point. Here are photos of my peanut ice cream burrito:

DAY 17

I started the day going off to church, and since it was my last Sunday, I immediately left after service to check out something nearby that I had been hearing things about – the huashan creative park. Basically it’s just giant outdoor mall of artisan displays, with some restaurants and tea shops in between. Here are the photos I took of that area:

I then went to a local coffee shop to write a whole bunch of postcards and have some really good tiramisu cake:

The next big thing I wanted to do this day was check out this 燈怪 performance back at the Chiang Kai Shek memorial. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I could see by the set-up for it, it was going to be epic, and it was ! I mostly have videos from that event, but here are the photos from that evening – along with probably the most delicious beef noodle soup I got to taste so far during my trip:

DAY 18

For this day, the main points on my itinerary was to visit National Taiwanese University’s (NTU) campus and this Matcha Shop (which was disappointing), and also an open mic night (which was also disappointing but will explain later).

Here are all the photos I took on NTU:

In the photos above, you can see there was this super cute shop with a koi pond right by the experimental farm on campus. I wish I had gotten lunch there. Instead, I went off campus briefly to get a fish bento (it was okay, the fish didn’t taste very fresh), hoping I could get some matcha ice cream for dessert but I found out that I couldn’t get ice cream during the summer. And so I opted to get a cheesecake, but you can’t only get a cheesecake if you want to eat in the shop. So I took it to go. It was very underwhelming, and it’s making me want to try to find a good matcha shop in the city for my last day tomorrow. Here are photos of my lunch and the matcha place:

And here is a sighting of Taipei 101 right outside of campus:

For the open mic night, when I finally got to the restaurant/bar, nobody was in there except for the owner. I stayed about 50 feet away, waiting for about 15 minutes to see if anyone else would show up, so no one did. So I got some garlic bread and went back to my AirBnb. There’s one more open mic night I could maybe check out tomorrow, but I won’t push it since it will be my last night here.

Anyways, thanks for reading !