Taiwan - Day 7 (Hot Pot & Uniqlo)

Board game night to close out the trip

Thursday, January 5, 2012

With another cold, rainy day in the forecast, and already almost a week spent seeing all the touristy hot spots in Taipei, my final day in Taiwan was set to be a pretty casual one.  The morning was passed by in the family apartment eating breakfast and babysitting William.

Spicy hot pot lunch for Muyen's birthday

Around 11:30 Amanda and Muyen picked me and Steph up to go to lunch to celebrate Muyen's birthday.  The selected restaurant this time around was a hot pot restaurant around 30 minutes away, and continuing the theme of advanced planning for the trip, apparently this reservation was only made a couple weeks in advance.  It was a good time with just us four youngin's enjoying the spicy meal.  Again, the locals were surprised with how my white boy eating habits could keep up with the rest of the group.  Although not nearly as painful, and much more tasty, I compared this situation to my Chinese massage experience where I was fighting off the hurt and trying to put on a strong face.  The real key to the meal though was that it was served with a large dose of plum juice.  Although only mildly tasty, this purple drank was instrumental in combating the ultra spiciness level in my mouth and so I had three large glasses.

A successful shopping trip

We relaxed a bit after lunch to digest, and then Steph and I headed on a little shopping trip to take advantage of cheap Taiwanese clothing.  We headed to Uniqlo, a new Japanese retailer in the area, which had become Steph's new favorite clothing store because of its low cost, high quality offerings, including Heattech, which was a new brand of lightweight clothing that creates body heat, or something like that.  I didn't realize until later that it was the same store that my dad had stumbled into in Manhattan two weeks earlier and showed me just so I could use their bathroom to change out of my suit and into my proper roaming-the-city-with-my-parents attire.  Anyways, now that I was here to shop they had really good deals, which I could only assume were cheaper than the New York prices, so I bought a bunch of shirts.

Around 5ish, we met up with another old UBS colleague.  It was another Mandarin-filled sit down meet and greet where I didn't have much opportunity to talk or listen.  Not to worry though since I had already become pretty accustomed to these meetings, and this was the last one of the trip.  We ran a couple more errands afterwards, and then headed back to the apartment for dinner of soft shell crab.  Very tasty.  At night we had Family Fun Night and played two games of the old board game, Life.  Board games know no language barriers, and although this was no Marbles, it was a fun time for all.  After the games finished up it was getting late, so I headed back to my hotel to pack up my gear, and prepare to put a close on the trip.  We would be heading back to the airport in the morning.