17/6
Flight at early morning 7.10am to Brunei(2 hr) to transfer(waited 1 hr) to Taipei(3 and half hour), due to the half hour delay because of waiting for some people catching connecting flight. Couldn't really sleep in the plane, still suffering from exam fever just ended the day before.
We reach Taipei around 2pm plus. Took some pamplet from the airport and process to take a bus from the airport to Taipei train station which is near our hotel.
The few counter selling bus ticket to various location of Taiwan keep shouting for customers telling people when the bus is going to leave by the minute. "3 min left for bus going to Taipei train station.... 2 min left..."
Well... isn't really easy carrying the luggage up and down the street, thank God we didn't have much problem finding the hotel, took us around 20min to walk there though. Place everything and came out to walk walk...
Notice thousand of bikes all over the street of Taipei, there are defnitely much more bikes than cars, weird thing is 99% is scooters and motorbike is hard to come by. The parking lots for the bikes are usually on the pavement, or the walkway below a building, so it's common to see a bike going very close to you by the walkway. Bike are park very closely together too, to ensure more bike being able to park, Taiwanese doesn't seem to mind their bike touching other's bike.
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The front part of every major road always have this part where bikes are allow to go to before the traffic light to give the bikes priority when the traffic light turn green.
Another interesting traffic rules is that bikes don't turn left at traffic light(taiwan road is driving on right hand), instead they go to this box after the pedestrain crossing of the perpenticular street and wait there for the traffic light to turn green. However the car just do it normally as we do. Draw it to show... ha ha...
Decide to go to Xi Men Ding, the street that is famous for setting the fashion trend in Taiwan. The street are close to cars at certain time.
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Very interesting shops. Taiwanese are so into Japanese fashion, a lot of young people just look exactly japanese. The shop tenders always shouted "甇∟��������""Huan Ying Guan Ling"(welcome) whenever you steping into the shop, at first I couldn't really catch it, I thought they were saying "Good morning", in the evening?
Then I realize it, cause they were saying it quite musically, the note will be "Do Do So Mi", well... this four chinese word just keep getting stuck in my head even now. Very kawaii....
Then all the shop assistance are just speaking so "cute", even the guy shop assistant, they always like to add a "wor" behind, "Feel free to take a look wor." It's not that they are trying to act cute, it's just the way they speak to attract customers.
There are lots of people on cart selling food, not sure if it's legal. The food just smell so nice, most food not found in Singapore. We went to get a "Mian Xian" for dinner seeing so many people queueing up to eat, no chairs, just stand or squat to eat and then return to bowl. Can you see the gal at the corner squatting?
Xi Men Ding at quite big, walk a few round, and seem to always wander into new areas, got one whole street full of cinemas too. Whole place pretty noisy with all the shouting to attract customers, lots of young fashion concious people around. There are also many people carrying banners to direct you to their shop in the smaller alleys.
We spend the whole night there and just walk around later, can see that there are countless convinient stores in Taipei, all 24 hrs like 7-eleven. Almost every street corner, you can find one, truly convinient. There are quite some 24 hrs shops arouing, eating place, cafe and even comics reading shop.
Look at the feet of that guy on the left, lying down enjoying life...
