Laurel was around for such great fun!

Laurel came to visit me and I was soooooo psyched. She stayed at no extra charge and it was awesome, besides that I wish I could have spent more time with her. We went out one night and met up with a guy she had met during her travels; he was also staying in Taipei. We checked out the night markets; some of the food looked absolutely disgusting (like squid and fish on a stick) but some of it looked great (the dumplings). I didn’t have the courage to try the street food though. I didn’t want to take the risk of potentially getting sick while fully across the globe. There were people at these markets who were, like in the US; clearly selling illegally; at one point we almost got run over by some people with wheelbarrows who were just plowing through crowds because the police were looking specifically for menaces like them. We also took a stroll through
Snake Alley, and I wish I could honestly say that I drank snake blood like most surveyors past, but I didn’t. I didn’t even get any pictures of any snakes! There was no one out in snake alley and I had no one brave enough with me to drink the blood also. And, in order to obtain the blood, a snake would have been killed for my sake and I didn’t really want to make that call, so I reluctantly passed.

We made sure to take a ton of pictures with the Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world until Dubai opened up the NEW tallest building in the world (at the turn of 2010?) most of these pictures were at the start of Edit’s and my “vacation” days – we had a few days to just hang out and relax so we took a bottle of wine to the NYC tribute statue (a replica of the statue of liberty) and sat on it due to the lack of tables in the area. We broke out our glasses and very obvious bottle of cab and started drinking in public – which we later found out was very illegal! We wondered why people were staring at us. Those stupid foreigners. Laurel was so accustomed to drinking in the streets in Korea that she was sure it wouldn’t be an issue at all. Our “illegal” drinking in the street became much more obvious when I dropped my first glass of wine on my lap. Smooth. Now we really had people just staring at us wondering what the hell we were doing. After buying sunglasses while tipsy, we went to the Hyatt hotel and took prices over glasses of vino while making stories up about the people around us, especially a sad looking woman sitting in the café alone, whose lover must have stood her up. That night we made it out to some Japanese hot springs where we bathed in numerous pools of varying temperatures (between hot and cold) and we took rice wine shots in between. Edit and I had ordered a bottle of rice wine a few days before. We tried, really hard to like it but it just never worked. It really just is gross, fyi.

During one of our free days, we went out to Wulai which had indigenous people and beautiful waterfalls. We just walked for hours. On the way back we took a ride to the tea fields - we stopped for a pot of tea and to hang out with a woman’s pet rabbit who humped her hand when she was trying to feed it. But on the upside, the views were spectacular; you could see straight out to the Taipei 101 – (not a huge surprise since it is the tallest building in the world!) We were going to get something to eat in these roaming, very local hills but nothing seemed to spark our fancy. I’ve just come to the conclusion that I don’t like real Chinese/Taiwanese food. We went all the way back into the city to get dinner at a place that was recommended and it was a real let-down. There were very few swanky restaurants with semi-normal food – high quality restaurants weren’t an American luxury last I checked? (I hope never to see intestines and brains and livers on menus again). The place we ate at was small and had a fast-food atmosphere to it. We were not impressed.