Christmas Day in Taipei

Oh hey! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

We've been out traveling since Christmas and we are soo glad to be back in Japan. We had a great time, but clean, quiet, orderly, polite, etc. is a welcoming thing coming back to Japan.

We left early Christmas morning and headed to our first stop on our trip: Taipei, Taiwan, where we had a layover until the next day. I didn't know what to expect for Taiwan. I was expecting China, and it was, but not really. We were very pleasantly surprised. Taiwan is open and welcome for tourism. They are happy to have tourists and you can tell they have done a lot to make it tourist friendly. Not to mention, people speak great English: not always the case in mainland China. We are realizing now that a return trip is necessary. Here's hoping we can sometime.

It was a bit rainy the whole day, but not cold thankfully. We headed to the center of the city to see the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial and walked around the gardens and saw the changing of the guards. Learned a bit about Chiang Kai-Shek too, since before we really had no idea who he was haha.

 ^^their concert hall. how cool would it be to perform in there??^^

 ^^Chiang Kai-Shek everything^^

We also headed to Taipei 101, a huuuuge building, the fourth tallest in the world. Wow! ;) Because of the weather we didn't see much from the top. 

  But on the ground floor was the famous dumpling restaurant Din Tai Fung, and we had an absolutely delicious Christmas feast devouring tons of dim sum.

 ^^every dumpling has to be perfect or it gets thrown out^^

Fascinated by the dumpling making.

And we may have come back here on our second layover at the end of our trip. Victor just had to have the dumplings!

Hopefully we can come back to Taiwan and experience more of the country. We had a nice Christmas day together. This is the first time since being together that it's just been our little family on Christmas. So far our only Christmas tradition that's been consistent as a married couple is traveling for Christmas. And we love it!