Taiwan Trip 2016: Day Five

The fifth day was met with a languid atmosphere. After climbing Yangming Mountain (陽明山) we were pretty exhausted. Most of us slept until 10:30-11:00 AM. My calves were the main soreness I was experiencing. Other than that I felt pretty good. It was shaping up to be a pretty relaxed day and our primary one for shopping. Megan (we found out later on) probably overexerted herself as her condition deteriorated throughout the day, and culminated in a fever.

We decided to go to Ding Tai Fung (鼎泰豐) for lunch. We ordered a lot of food. ~$4000NT of food to be exact. We pretty much ordered one of everything on the menu. We were very full afterwards.

After we managed to roll ourselves out of the restaurant, we headed towards Eslite Bookstore (誠品書店) at the suggestion of one of Adam’s friends. On the way we found a pretty cute boutique called MaMa. This was our first store in a long line of shopping stops for the day.

We continued onto the Eslite Bookstore, but there was some kind of cultural design expo going on outside, so we stopped in briefly.

We finally made it into the actual mall area, and started some serious shopping. It had multiple floors of shops, all of them pretty unique. We were all pretty satisfied with the options we had.

Grass Jelly Milk Tea!

We entered when it was light out and upon exiting night had descended on us. The consistent 12 hours of day 12 hours of night cycle that happens is pretty interesting. It’s nice to wake up to an already warmed up day, but it’s weird to have it be so dark around 5:30, especially since it felt like summer and we’re not used to that in Michigan.

We continued to Dan Shui (淡水) with the remainder of our day for more shopping. I had been telling Dante about the Condom World (保險套世界) store that was there 10 years ago. We were pleased that they were still in business. It definitely reminded me of Safe Sex Store in Ann Arbor. We walked down Dan Shui Old Street (淡水老街) and finished our shopping day. Yong got a caricature drawn and we headed home.