Taiwan ~Taipei 101

There it is.... Taipei 101, the worlds second largest building. 

Scott has been traveling to Taiwan for business for about 15 years now.  Since we are living in Singapore our whole family was able to travel this time around.

While Scott was at work today the boys and I took a taxi into Taipei for some sight seeing and shopping.  We were concerned about communicating with the taxi drivers as they only speak Mandarin.  In order to assure we got to where we wanted to go, we pulled up the sights on google, found the Mandarin character description and address then took a screen shot so we would have a physical picture to show our driver.  It worked great, there was no problem getting to where we needed to go.  In all we took three taxis today and had no problems.

First up on our list, Taipei 101, up until a few years ago it was the tallest building in the world, that now lies in Dubi.  None the less it is still a really tall building!

As we were walking up to the entrance we came across a group of workers doing some yoga!  It was about 11:00.  In fact twice today we saw this, once at Taipei 101 and once at the National Museum.

Once inside you can take the worlds fastest elevator to the 89th floor for some amazing observation.  How fast you ask? Well it took us 35 seconds to get up there.  Yes, our ears did pop!

We were blessed with a blue sky and white fluffy clouds allowing us to see a long, long way off.

Taipei is a rather large city

When you are finished viewing from inside you can take the stairs up to the 91st floor to observe from outside.  What a great breeze we had up there!

Because of the breeze, this building has a huge "wind damper" in the center.  It is a big metal ball hanging on steel cables.  The weight of the ball helps to prevent the building from swaying at the top.  From what we read, the sway is reduced by 40%.

By now we were hungry.  In B1 there is a food court and in the food court there was Karen's Tapanyaki.  We said yes to that and are so glad we did, the food was amazing!

Our second stop was the Starbucks, we are collecting country and city mugs so we needed both our Taiwan mug and our Taipei mug.  Success!

If you look at the "what to do in Taipei" lists you will see that the National Palace Museum ranks high on the list.  This was our final stop of the day.

It was.... a museum. It did have some really old items that were saved from China during the revolution when the Chinese government was destroying their artifacts to make way for "The New China."

Here is a garbage can we found interesting.

 And finally.... some street views on the way back to our hotel.