My Last Day - Sumup Is Coming Tomorrow

I'm at the airport waiting for the 11:20 p.m. flight to LA.

We spent my last day walking revisiting some old places and exploring some new areas.

We started by revisiting the beautiful Longshan temple so I could pay my final respects to Guanyin. The temple was very busy, particularly in the rear corner near the deities that represent excellence in literature. Young people, probably getting ready for exams, crowded into that area, bringing offerings of food and their sincere desire for their own success. The temple attendants were giving out Longshan pens and I was lucky enough to get two.

We wandered through the market area nearby and then window shopped at the row of Buddhist religious supply stores. We decided to walk north then to Ximending.

Ximending is where young people shop, watch movies, and perhaps party in Taipei. The action is centered on a series of streets that feed into a  a three block pedestrian mall, a mall that actually didn't have motot scooters on it. It was Saturday afternoon when we were there and it was almost packed. We thought it would be packed later.

The sad things is that a great majority of the stores contain foreign designer brands, not Taiwanese or even Chinese brands, I looked at a few items and the foreign goods seem to go on sale for about 10% to 15% less than they sell for in the US. A $150 iPod was about $125--not enough to make me busy some for resale.

We hopped back on the MRT to head north to yet another neighborhood in Taipei. We walked a bit and got to Dihua Street, historically one of the famous shopping streets in Taipei. We walked south on Dihua (which was treacherous since there was no good sidewalk and lots of traffic) until we got to the City God Temple. Many of the neighborhoods that we've visited used to be villages, each with a City God temple. Those villages grew together to form modern Taipei, so now it's neighborhoods that have City God temples.

We walked two blocks from there to the museum of the Taipei puppet compnay. In a small but tall building they had collected examples of very old stick, string, and shadow puppets from China, Taiwan, and India and these really interesting water puppets from Vietnam. The also had an exhibit about how tthe Cultural Revolution in China affected puppetry there.

We went back to the hotel and I finished packing, then we went to have dinner in one of our neighborhood restaurants. In the first restaurant the servers were eating dinner and didn't really want to help us make sense of the menu. We left and went into another, always busy restaurant a block further from the hotel. They were very helpful and we successfully ordered a very good meal. We chose a fish that was on ice in the front of the restaurant and they cooked it in some delicious broth. It really melted in your mouth.

I took a bus to the airport that took an indirect route to the airport. I had to switch terminals and search for the departure area but I successfully made it to the gate.