Exploring Taiwan - Tamsui & Shilin

As we enter our 10th year of our wedding anniversary, here we are in a foreign land of Taiwan, exploring the beautiful city of Taipei. We arrive this morning and our anniversary is tomorrow on the 2nd February 2018. It has been our mission as a couple to collect as much fuel (memories) as we grow old together. So this post is to share with you our trips and activities, perhaps one day you would fall in love with Taiwan as we did.

This going to be a long post with plenty of photos so I will try my best not to bore you. 😂

Our 1st day.

We took an early flight this morning via Air Asia and reached Taiwan earlier than scheduled. The current temperature now is between 10 to 12 degrees Celsius. We took an MRT from Taoyuan airport to Taipei Main Station and changed our train to Tamsui line for a stop at Jiantian where our accommodation at Who’s Knock Micro Apartment is located.

Photo taken just below our apartment

For your information, we booked our accommodation via Airbnb. Henry, the homeowner is very attentive to every question I’ve raised. Since this is our first time booking an accommodation via Airbnb, we have some fears and doubts. It turns out that Henry’s apartment is beyond than what we expected. We couldn't be happier with the choice that we made.

Decent deco at Henry's place. He's so thoughtful by giving us a chocolate for our anniversary.

So, why did I choose to book with Airbnb?

• To have a new experience
• Convenient
• Fair deals
• Personal touch
• Making new friend

Prior our trip here, Henry had made an effort to send us directions on how to get to his place either by bus, taxi or MRT. With the PDF that he sent to us, finding his place is so easy. It's impossible for you to get lost.

Once we’ve settled down and made ourselves at home, we went down and had our lunch Taiwanese style just below our apartment. We had a fried rice, fried omelette and fried fish cakes. Me and hubby @danieldoughty could not believe that we’ve only paid less than 1 steem for the lunch. Haha.

So, we’re back to Jiantian MRT station and bought ourselves an easy card. An easy card is a transportation card for you to have access to the public transportation. You need to purchase a non-refundable card at NTD 100 and top-up to any amount for the usage.

Our first tour for today is visiting the Fort San Domingo in Tamsui. From Jiantian, we need to change our train at Beitou and continue our journey to another train that consists of 13 stops before we could reach to Tamsui. And from there, we need to hop on a bus, R26 to Fort San Domingo.

Within walking proximity of Fort San Domingo, there is so much to see and explore. This includes Tamsui Oxford Archives of Oxford College, Little White House, Ground of Aletheia University, British Consular Residence and Fisherman Wharf. There was so much to learn and it was an eye-opening to the history of Tamsui and Taiwan.

As soon as we done visiting all the tourist sites, we wanted to go to the National Palace Museum at Shilin. But then it began drizzling. Afraid that we might catch a cold, we’ve decided to postpone our museum trip and instead, we went for an early dinner at Shilin night market.

Shilin night market is a heaven for street foods. Feeling a little bit adventurous, we’ve decided to try the street foods as many as our stomach can take 😁. One of interesting experience was having the stinky tofu. It is not that bad and surprisingly it tastes good.

Fried stinky tofu

Food and shopping galore 👗👜👠 🍛🍢

It was 8:00 pm when we’ve finally given up and feeling tired. Without having decent sleep since yesterday, we both decided to go back and have an early rest.

The view of the night market from our apartment

I’m going to write again about our trip tomorrow around Taipei. Till then, wǎn'an my fellow steemians 😉

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