Taiwan

Our Apartment

Taipei 101

our neighbourhood

appeasing the ancestors

tofu selection

Killjoy was here

Chaing Kai-Shek Park

night market stall

queueing outside Din Tai Fung

Furlong

A week to chill and catch up with friends in Singapore is always good. This time we stayed with Claire and Graham; our wonderful hosts. They even organised a party so we could see everyone. Adding to the ever growing list of great places to eat in Singapore, we loved the roast chicken and veggies at the chain outlet Poulet.

On Wednesday 29 March, we flew to Taipei on my first trip to Taiwan. The iTaipei 2 Serviced Apartments proved to be a great find, located just minutes from the Grand Hyatt and the Taipei 101 building. On first impressions, Taiwan is an interesting cross between China and Japan. Air pollution is very bad but the city of Taipei is safe and fun. It's not as exciting as Hong Kong or as organised as Singapore and apart from literally 1 or 2 buildings, I can safely say Taipei has never won any architectural or town planning prizes. You may not visit for the urban beauty but you will visit for the food, especially Chinese and Japanese cuisines. We loved the well priced Japanese restaurant​s and visited the original Din Tai Fung for the best dim sum in the world. Of course it's a chain now with branches everywhere from Sydney ​to New York and one of our favourites whenever we are in Singapore but there's nothing like sharing tables with the rush of office workers for fluffy pork buns and juicy dumplings at the original 5 level shop in Linyi.

Taipei is also known for it's night markets when hundreds of food carts emerge from the back alleys and set up along busy pedestrianised shopping streets; pig organ soup next to green tea ice cream. We visited Shilin and Roahe.

Our favourite way to explore a city is by walking in the various different neighbourhoods. We don't need to tick off a lot of sites but we pepper our walking with a few touristy bits.

Xinji is the modern business area of town and Da'an has nice street life, cafes and restaurants.

We mastered the MRT and caught the train out to Songshan to wander around Wufenpu, the fashion district.

Ximen is a bustling shopping area filled with young people but just walk down a few side streets and you'll find the edgier arty and LGBT crowd.

Lin Sen North rd is the Japanese red light area.

We had a great time visiting Simon, Tina and the kids for delicious Chinese food at home. We went away to the local beach 'resort' of Furlong with them for the weekend too. The weather was fine for beach walks but not ideal for swimming. We did have good seafood and spend lots of time polishing off copious amounts of Simon's whisky and shooting the breeze into the early hours.