First Day in Taiwan

So yesterday was my first official day in Taipei.  Like I mentioned in the last post the city is beautiful.  It’s not nearly as clean as Tokyo but so rich with culture.  My hotel view is amazing; it looks out over the Grand hotel and the hilly landscape.  The first trip on the agenda was to the Imperial Palace museum.  This is where they house some of the greatest works of Chinese art.  Unfortunately they didn’t allow cameras in the museum so I don’t have any art pictures.

Grand Hotel view from my room

Palace Museum

After the museum we went to the Jade market in Taipei.  This is the biggest Jade market in Southeast Asia.  It was amazing to all the hand crafted ornaments, not just jade but all kinds of materials.  We learned how to say too expensive in mandarin which came in handy when bartering at the shops.

Jade Market

Next we hopped on a bus and went dinner with some of the Alumni in Taiwan who participated in study aboard at U of M Flint.  One of the students there was Jo who I had Management Science with last year. All the students spoke English very well, which in turn made me feel bad for not even knowing how to say Thank you properly in Mandarin.  They told us about their time in Flint and we learned a little about Taiwanese culture.

Lastly a group of us decided to go check out a Taiwan dance club.  We’d heard the Luccy was one of the most popular clubs in Taiwan so we got cleaned up and headed out.  Unfortunately we were unaware of the dress code and couldn’t get in because of shorts and sandals.  We found a shop selling cheap pants on the street and we each picked up a pair of parachute/pj pants. However, we couldn’t find a shop selling reasonable shoes so we got turned away again.

Day one, excellent.