My 2.4m x 0.9m space

Taipei 2023: 信義

posted : Saturday, December 09, 2023

Day 5 - family’s last day in Taipei actually, while I still have a couple of days in store.

Started the day with our breakfast that got postponed by a couple of days - the sister and I headed out on a couple of stops worth of train ride to tapao 阜杭豆漿 while the parents chilled in the room. We were greeted by a long queue of course, not sure if it could have been worse since it’s just a regular weekday but I thought the queue moved quite fast and we ended up queuing for 45 minutes “only”.

Queue length: 45 minutes

Bustling kitchen with all their Michelin accolades

What we bought. If I were to be honest….i didn’t think they are thattt special. Their you tiao were very flaky and crispy though

Post breakfast, as usual took our own sweet time to head out. Agenda of the day was just to hang out at the 信義 area, starting of course with Taipei’s landmark - Taipei 101, because I decided that it’s a must see for them. The mall itself opens late like 11am though the observatory opens earlier, so the mall security were super wary when we attempted to cut across to the lift towards the observatory. Which is odd coz you would think they would have been used to this by now, oh well. Observatory tickets were discounted via Pelago.

Shot from the top

Damper

Went up to the outdoor observatory

Got discount vouchers so the sister and I sat down at this cafe for a bit, Mont Blanc cake was decent but I generally am not a big chestnut fan. But wait does this make this the highest cafe in the world (above the one I am visiting in a couple days time).

Think this is my third time going up so I don’t suppose it would make it to my itinerary the next time I’m in Taipei. Getting dad interested enough to ask for a picture with damper baby is a win in my books though.

Mum likes to buy souvenir photos. At least dad gave a thumbs up heh

Came down from observatory, grabbed a simple lunch at the food court downstairs, and souvenir shopped a bit. Uber-ed to 五分埔 next! Planned to spend the whole afternoon here but it turns out to be a sad place - few shoppers, shops don’t seem all that interested and we didn’t buy much at all. Which was a far cry from my previous trips here where it was bustling with activity. Not quite sure what happened though, either changing retail landscape or Covid. We still spent a couple of hours but dad bailed out after half an hour and went to sit down at a park, mum persisted for a while more before joining him and me and the sister just sped up after that hahaha.

101 shopping mall. I don’t actually have any photos from the rest of the afternoon, shows how boring that portion was hahah

Back to 信義 coz our dinner reservation is somewhere there, and we have a couple of hours to kill so we did a bit of shopping at the department stores in the area. Which turned out to be rather productive coz we ended up buying new specs, not that it’s particularly cheap but mood is there so we just bought a pair each. And spent so much time there that we almost ran late for our dinner reservation. Which there was a long queue for the elevator to go up, and parents weren’t exactly fast walkers.

The 商圈, actually it’s quite a nice area to walk around

BBT of the day, I feel like the SG branch is on the verge of dying

Dinner was pretty good though! The sister wanted hotpot at first (which was sort of also my plan), and we would have gone to 無老, and we actually did manage to reserve. But I kind of convinced her to change to 熱炒 in the end coz I thought we could eat hotpot anywhere, and Taiwanese 熱炒 would be more local. No regrets in the end, just wished that we had one more meal in us coz I didn’t realise 無老was a big deal ahahah.

This smoked cod dish was the best of the night.

Night view. Quite a few buskers around and I think it’s quite chill to hang around

And called it a night. Fam had to pack (and it’s usually a big operation so needed some time).

Labels: holidays, taiwan, travel

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8:10 PM

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