I am home now from my annual Christmas trip to the US. On the way back to Bangkok, I stopped in Taiwan for New Years. Luckily, Piyawat was able to join me for this part of the trip. We hung out with our Taiwanese friends Ike and Jonah on New Years Eve, and went to see the fireworks at the Taipei 101 building. We were a couple of kilometers away, but it was still impressive to see fireworks shooting out of the tallest building in the world.
Here's a 3-minute low-res video that Piyawat took of the festivities that gives you some idea of what it was like:
The next afternoon, Piyawat and I boarded a train and headed south to the town of Hualien, and the next morning we hired a taxi to take us on a tour of Takoro Gorge, a very narrow but deep cut through the mountains. But the coolest part of this gorge is that the walls are made of polished marble.
After another night in Hualien, we caught the express (2 hours, versus 4 hours on the way down) train back to Taipei. We had a couple more nights here, one of which we went to the hot spring spas at Beitou with Ike and Jonah and another night we went out with Jonah and a couple of friends from Singapore who were also celebrating the new year in Taipei.
On our last day, Piyawat and I both decided that we liked Taipei a lot. In fact, we agreed that it was probably somewhere that we would enjoy living. I think that is the only place in Asia outside of Thailand that we have ever reached that conclusion together.
I posted some pictures of our friends and our trip to Takoro Gorge on Facebook.
That was incredible. Some of those flashes looked like the building exploded.
Yeah. And I bet it was even more impressive close up!
Now it would have been REALLY cool to have been inside the building watching the fireworks.