Site Seeing in Taiwan

We had a great time in Taiwan. We arrived at 5AM on Sunday 7/13 and after attempting some sleep on the plane had a full day of site seeing. We also did some site seeing on Tuesday and then Wednesday was the big day when we picked up Katie, then Thursday and Friday we did some site seeing together as a family for the first time! Here are some photos from our trip (descriptions are below photos):

This is the flight status screen at my seat on the plane. We were almost there when I took this photo! We each had our own screen that came with free movies, video games, TV shows etc. even in Economy class!

This is the Chiang Kai Shek Taiwan Democracy Memorial & Gardens in Taipei. This was our first stop in Taiwan. It was very large and busy! We really enjoyed our time here.

Here we have the Lung-shan Temple also in Taipei. It was a very unique experience to enter this temple and watch people worship. If you look closely you can see some other office buildings right next to it. Taipei has a very unique mixture of traditional and modern architecture.

These are photos from the National Palace Museum. This building was stunning from the outside and the historical works of art on the inside were no less so.

While posting these photos of Taipei 101 I almost ask myself "Why bother?" There is no photo in the world that can correctly portray the awesomeness of this building. The first time I saw it, it gave me goose bumps and every time thereafter still succeeded in taking my breath away. We visited it on Thursday as our first family outing. We wanted to make sure to take Katie with us when we went as it is such a symbol of her homeland.

Joe took the first picture while we were in a taxi and still several blocks away. The other picture of course is standing below and then there is a not so clear picture of us inside when we went to the observatory. A small typhoon hit that day and while we were buying our tickets they warned that the view was not good that day. When we got off the elevator (the smoothest and fastest elevator in the world by the way) I was once again stunned. The "bad view" was the most stunning view I had ever seen. I cannot even imagine what it would have been like on a good day!



Lastly, here are just some random photos of the city from our hotel. The city itself is very dense.