Location: Taipei, Taiwan

So I thought today was going to be pretty chill, since yesterday was so intense and my legs were killing me when I woke up from all the parade dancing. However. I will give away the ending of this story for context I walked almost 30,000 steps today.

THIRTY. THOUSAND.

It started off with an adventure to get food with with Caro, a girl I met yesterday from Montreal. We walked and talked for ages before we came across Yuanshan Market, this Sunday morning fiasco of aisles and aisles of food fare, with performers everywhere and extremely loud electronic music. We waited for a long time for food, and eventually grabbed dense little tasty donuts and coffee to take along with us. We headed over to Bao’an Temple, which was even more intricate and impressive than the others I’ve seen. It had so many mini figurines and scenes of people on ships along the roof that could barely even be seen from the ground.

Across the street was the Confucius Temple, on the 2,000 year old site of the original home of Confucius. Inside the temple were many prayers, as well as Confucius’s tablets describing his teachings- not that I could read them. It was still interesting to learn more about Confucianism, as my knowledge beforehand was limited. I didn’t know that it’s less of a religion and more of a school of thought that teaches three essential values: Filial piety (basically just be good to your parents), humaneness, and ritual. The more you know! (Not sure why more people don’t follow this??).

We rushed back to the hostel to pick up our friends Liv, Kobi and Jack, as we wanted to make it to Elephant Mountain for sunset. I thought it was going to be a nice easy walk (as other friends had said) but it turned out to be an extremely long staircase to a lookout point. Absolutely worth the trek but if I don’t have amazing legs at the end of this trip I’m gonna be pissed. We watched the sun go down behind Taipei 101 and talked about how much we’ve enjoyed Taiwan so far.

Starved and fresh off the staircase we beelined it to Tonghua Night Market for some food. This is the fourth night market I have been to, and am beyond jealous this is a regular thing in this country. I want night markets at home. They are cheap, tasty, fast and fun. I have loved going to all of them, even the touristy ones. Liv and Kobe are flying out in the middle of the night tonight, so they had to head home to pack. We said our goodbyes at the train station, and Jack and I headed to Da’an Park to check out a free jazz music festival someone on the train told us about.

The D list musicians were clearly stuck with the end performances so we didn’t stay too long, though it made me more sleepy and gave me even more exercise for the day walking there.

just to reiterate. 30,000 steps. I am done walking. My legs hate me.

I have been passing by dozens of massage parlours on every street since getting here so maybe I’ll go for a foot massage tomorrow. That might fix my current problem!

Sav

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New People:

• Jack – England