Taipei - Day 2

So, here we are. Day two of our trip in Asia. Although only two days have passed, it seems like we've already been here for a week! It's quite possible that it is just the slight fatigue from the flight, but anyway, we have had a great time here so far.
This day consisted of a trip to the Taipei Main Station, and visit to a school, and more night market exploring.
The Teipai Main Station, as you can imagine, is the hub for train and metro travel in Taipei. We went there for two reasons. One was to get some tourist information, and the other was to get some lunch. We wondered around in the station for what seemed to be an eternity trying to find where the tourist information was. Now, this is with a native speaker and reader of Chinese, and a half-way descent speaker and reader of Chinese. I don't want to know what would have happened if we had no language ability... After finding the tourist info, we headed up to the next floor for lunch. There were all kinds of restaurants. Mostly Asian places, but there was a burger king and starbucks, as well as a cold stone. We settled on a noodle shop.

We came back for a 2:00 O'clock meeting and tour at the Mandarin Daily News. This is a daily newspaper, but the building also houses a large school. They teach English, composition, music, math, science, and, of course, ping-pong! It is a weekend school for those students (young, middle school age I think) who don't want any free time on Saturday or Sunday. My dad actually studied Chinese there for six months or so when he was here in Taipei 27 years ago. It was interesting how we ended up getting to go there in the first place. My dad wanted to go to the MDN so that we could see where he had been when he was last here, but we didn't have any plans to go becuase we were not sure if we would be allowed to just walk in and look around. Well, this morning, our host, Dr. Chen, got a phone call from the director at the MDN to see if Dr. Chen knew of any American families who were around and maybe wanted to help teach conversational English. As it turns out, we'er here! So, without us having to do anything, we were able to take a tour of the whole building and get a feeling for what is going on!
We went back to our "place of residence" and rested for a while. Then we hit the streets in search of some dinner. We are only a few blocks from some of the night markets. Basically, a few long streets with vendors, people, and the ocassional scooter about to run you over from behind :) I'll expound upon them later.
-Aaron


Scooters! Here is one of the main streets. Each ally and side street is filled to the brim with parked scooters.













The Guting metro entrance. This is just one block from where we are staying













The Entrance to the metroReally, nothing much
different from America. The metro coins are plastic, but they have a radio chip inside. So, to get in, instead of dropping the coin in a slot, you just wave it over the gate. It's pretty cool.












Part of the Taipei Main Station.

Us in the Mandarin Daily News building. Our first real touristy picture. You can tell this is a tourist photo because we are in a place that is completely unknown. We could be in our living room in CA for that matter.














Here is the head of the English department, Queenie Tsai. She was the one who took us around and showed us the building.