My 4th trip to Taiwan!! 
And, 1st time visiting Pingxi, Alishan, Kaohsiung and Tainan~
It was a rather impromptu trip as it was dependent on us successfully buying tickets to Girls Generation concert in Taipei!
When the tickets went on sale, the ticketing website crashed and we spent the entire afternoon refreshing the website and checking for updates. The organizers brought the site down and were trying to fix the website. However, in the evening they decided to sell the tickets via ticketing points and it was of course, a sell-out concert.
Then, the organizers added an extra day for the concert and another Sat was spent refreshing the overloaded website! In the end, after refreshing the website for almost 7h, I managed to buy 2 tickets to the concert on 17th Oct. Tiring!
That left us with only 3 weeks to plan for the trip and usually, I prefer to have more time to organize trips! Anyway, we got everything in order and arrived in Taipei on 10 Oct~
I don’t really like to take the Freego bus to Xi Men Ding, where our hotel is located, but there’s not much choice of transportation from Taoyuan Airport.
It is a hassle to change bus mid-way as we have to unload and reload our luggages. Moreover, it’s a small bus w/o the luggage compartment so you need to carry your luggage up the bus and hopefully, get a seat or suffer standing for the rest of the journey. It’s uncomfortable since it’s quite packed (with people and luggage). Probably next time we should take the other bus to Taipei Main Station and transfer to the metro or cab as I read that this bus doesn’t involve any transfers.
While waiting to check-in to our hotel, we walked over to have lunch at Feitian HotPot in Xi Men Ding – we chose the original and herbal soup bases. The herbal one had a lot of herbs within so it was quite troublesome as the food would get tangled with them! haha.
A LOT of meat (and we couldn’t quite differentiate between which is which, since they served them all at once!). There were choices of beef, lamb, pork and chicken. It was pretty good, well, except for the chicken.
Love the free flow of Haagen Dazs ice cream too~ I think I ate 3 scoops, kekeke.
One of the tables had a small dog with them. In Singapore, most restaurants/cafes or shopping centers don’t allow animals to enter but in other countries, I think it is quite common to see pets in stores or on public transport. Hmm, I don’t really like the idea of allowing pets into eating places because it doesn’t seem too hygienic. However, it would be great if we could take pets onto public transport and bring them to places even if one doesn’t have a car!
After we came back, I read about this mala hotpot place which seems to be quite popular. Shall try next time!
Note: Will be posting the photos as-is for this trip instead of combining them into collages – saves time & effort.
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