Today’s first stop is Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂). After a short tour of the hall, we were given a short amount of free time do look around. But my family decided to check out the changing of the guard. It’s amazing how the guards could stand motionless for at least an hour. I don’t even remember seeing them blink.

Then, we were finally off to get some food in our tummy! We headed towards Taipei 101 to eat Ding Tai Fung (鼎泰豐)! I’ve had my first Ding Tai Fung experience in Hong Kong but I still looked forward to eat at where the restaurant originated from.

After a quick but satisfying meal, we got on the bus again to go to Jioufen (九份). I never heard of this place before coming to Taiwan but my dad said it’s full of delicious food and snacks.

Because the location was on top of a really curvy road and high on a mountain, our bus weren’t allowed to go directly to the place. In fact, all tour buses have to park at a parking lot and transfer to a local bus line.

There were a lot of authentic Taiwanese snacks but a lot of the stalls were replicas of each other in terms of the food they were selling. Again, we only had a limited amount of time to spend here so we picked and chose a few things we wanted to try (given that it was super crowed too and it was really hard to just walk through the alley).

My favorite was this crepe-like snack that was layered with peanut shavings and filled with ice-cream in the middle.

It was getting dark and it was time for us to head to our next destination, which was some sort of a temple. I tried digging through my pictures and my memories but I can’t figure out the name of the place…so a picture of the place will do:

We got to roam around a street market before going to Ximending (西門町) and apparently there’s this really famous papaya milk that’s really good. And the tour guide said that once you tried it nothing will be able to compare to it. I must say that she was completely right and it was the best papaya milk EVER.

Our last stop of the day was Ximending and since our dinner that day wasn’t included we had to find food to eat there.

^ I think that’s supposed to be a really famous noodle place but I didn’t particularly liked the smell and the thick texture of it.

Day 3 coming soon…