Tai Mall and Arches

We are staying at the Monarch Plaza, it is a beautiful lobbyed hotel in a nice downtown location.  Scott has been here like 40 times so it is nice for us to be able to experience a little of his life abroad. 

There is a bank of six elevators, we have never had anyone else in our elevator the entire time we have been here.  This is a very nice change from the crammed elevators in Singapore.

The lobby has this fabulous ship made entirely of carved jade, the carving is impressivly detailed and as you can see it is a  huge ship.

Our room is on the 14th floor with a city view, a living room....

a beautiful granite bathroom with a tub that is deep and a seperate glass shower. In addition there is a bedroom with two double beds.

  When Scott is here on his own he does not get such a delux room but this time Rockwell put us in the family suit and the hotel upgraded us to the delux suit free of charge.  I guess it is helpful to have been here 40 times.

The boys and I had planned to do a walking tour of the city today and take all kinds of cultural pictures but we awoke to rain so we went to the mall.

Tai Mall, is a nice big mall and we were pleased to find The 3 Baboons from Boston to eat at.

The cheese sticks had REAL cheese.  You may wonder why we are in a mall eating western food when we are in Taiwan.  Living in Singapore gives us plenty of Asian food experiences and sometimes you just simply want something that seems normal to you.  That was today, we wanted normal.

Speaking of normal we were sitting in our booth eating our fried food and suddenly I looked up to notice the picture behind the boys.

Yes that's right, the Packers with Bret Farve right there in Taiwan.  Yep, it felt "normal" to us.

After Scott got home from work he took us to Arches

One of his favorite local places to eat.  It is a Thai place and we loved it.  We ordered some beef and bamboo stew that was serve in bamboo

We also had some cold chicken, some cilantro covered beef, spring rolls, and deep fried bananas.  Best of all we were experiencing it all together as a family.

Tomorrow we hope to go into Taipei and experience the night market and "snake alley"  We also saw a Mountain Hardware store so of course we will have to see if they have good prices on some great gear!