6/30

Today, our first stop is the Old Taiwan Magitrate Residence. Japan occupied Taiwan for about 50 years and there are a lot of historical sites in Tainan.

A lot of Chinese and Taiwanese still hold a grudge against Japan for what did to them during those times. I am not sure how I feel about Japan but history is history.

Today definitely feels like a typical summer day in Taiwan. We are under a heat advisory for our remainer time in Taiwan. So we need to limit our activities outdoors.

Our next stop was the Confucius Temple. I love historical sites!!!

I think this is my third time visiting the Confucius Temple, even though it was very hot, I still loved it!

We saw a couple getting their wedding photos done at the temple and we had to let them know how great they looked for their photo shoot and wish them a happy life together.

Next, we went to Hayashi, which is the first Japanese style shopping mall. It was opened on December 5th, 1932. My aunt said after the Japanese retreated back to Japan, nobody took care of the building and it was abandoned for a while. She always thought it was a haunted house when she was little. Then some residents realized that it is a historical site and they restored it.

One of our friends from a while ago lives in Tainan. Every time we visited Tainan, we never had a chance to meet up. She saw my Instagram account that we are in Tainan so she made a special stop at Hayayshi and brought me a cup of iced coffee and a couple little snacks.

We had lunch at Du Xiaoyue with their famous noodle. Their noodles are what the teenagers said the best meal they had out of this whole trip.

Since it was so hot. We went to have some icy treats.

This is a very famous icy treat spot in the whole city!!!

We then went home to play mahjong and had a simple dinner!

6/29

Today we are heading south to Tainan. My mom's childhood home. My mom is the oldest of five kids, she has a brother and three sisters. Her youngest sister worked and lived in Taipei for a while. My youngest aunt offered to drive us down to Tainan and we stopped by YuJing District, where mangoes are produced. We saw a lot of mango gardens and we visited a traditional produce wholesale market for the famous mango shaved ice.

YuJing is very close to Tainan so after shaved ice, we went to a famous street food spot for some yummy Tainan cuisine.

We got to my uncle's apartment. They live on the 23rd floor. The teens loved the view from that high up.

We started a friendly game of mahjong before dinner.

We had dinner with another one of my aunt and my cousin, Ping, who is a snowboarding coach in Japan.

6/28

Every time I met up with Ilina and Lawrence, they treat me to karaoke. I used to listen to a lot of Asian pop music and we always have music playing in the house and in the car. So today, they treated teenagers to karaoke to experience it.

At first, I thought these 3 American teenagers would be shy and not want to sing in front of others using a microphone. But they impressed all of us!

Peggy and Julie later joined us with Bella and Isa. Bella and Isa were not interested in singing karaoke, they just wanted to hang out with Catherine cand talk till the end of the world.

Lawrence booked the room from 1pm to 4pm but the two boys seemed to be enjoying it a lot and kept added more songs to the queue so Lawrence extended our time for another hour.

Then we had dinner together.

6/27

We haven't had shiao long bao in Taiwan yet, so my friends from middle school were treating us to Ding Tai Fong, the most famous shiao long bao in Taiwan. And we went to the flagship restaurant under Taipei 101.

We had a party of 12!!! I felt like we ordered everything on their menu. It was a yummy treat for sure!

Then we had to tour Taipei 101! The last time I toured Taipei 101, I think it was close to 15 years ago. The first 5 floors are all designer stores, basically things we can't really afford!

We took the escalator to the 5th floor and rode the elevator to the 89th floor. It took only 37 seconds to get from the 5th floor to the 89th floor.

My legs were shaking a little when I tried to look out the ceiling-to-floor glass windows. It was a little cloudy but we could still see a lot of landmarks. Catherine and I even found the apartment that we are stayingin right now.

We stopped by the gift shop and bought a puzzle, 3 snow globes, and 5 post cards.

We than walked to Shinkō Mitsukoshi because there is a Pokemon Center in that mall. We forgot that summer had started yesterday and today was a Saturday. The Pokemon Center was packed and you had to take a number to get in. Our time slot to get in is 6:45-6:55 so we had to try to kill 3 hours in the mall. The boys and us went separate ways.

There was a Popmart in the center of the first floor. Of course we had to stop by... The Nintendo Store is right next to the Pokemon Center. It was the first store we stopped by after we got our number/time slot to enter the Pokemon Center. I refrained myself from buying Animal Crossing accessories but Catherine bought a Pikmin blind box.

We met up with the boys right at 6:45 and they shopped at the Pokemon Center for about 45 minutes. We then decided to get some food from the night market and call it a night.

6/26

Today we headed back to Taipei from Osaka. There was a typhoon (we call it hurricane in Texas) approaching so there was heavy rain around Kyoto. We first took the train from Sakurajima to Nishikujo. While waiting for the train that would take us straight to the airport, we saw that the train was cancelled due to rain. We had to had to take another train to Shin-Imamiya and then walked to the subway to take the Airport Express.

Even though it was the Airport Express, it would still take 45 minutes from Shin-Imamiya to Kansai Airport.

Our flight was delayed from 1:10pm to 1:35pm and we got to the check-in counter around 12:15pm. It took us at least 20 minutes to check in and I was able to find a mail box to mail back our Japanese Wi-Fi, which by far was the best one we've used on this trip.

We pass through security and had to take a little airport transportation to our gate and by the time we got to the gate, it was time to board.

My aunt and uncle came a little late to pick us up. It was the last day of school and a Friday, so the traffic in the afternoon around the airport was worse than the rush hour. It took us a while to get back and my aunt bought us dinner before dropping us off.

6/25

Today is our last full day in Osaka, Japan. I should've booked another hotel for the days that we were not at Universal Studio. That way we didn't have to take an extra train and it probably will help on the day we head back to Taiwan since we plan on taking the train instead of convenient but pricy taxi.

It's been raining consistently since yesterday and we only brought 2 umbrellas so I visited 7-11 in the morning and got a big clear umbrella.

Today we wanted to visit Animate so we headed out on the same train route as yesterday.

The rain here is different. It is very very light rain but it rains the whole day and using an umbrella is unavoidable!

In Texas, we hop in our car and we reach our destination, probably park in a garage, then we hop out to go. It doesn't matter how bad the rain is, almost nobody carries an umbrella. In either Taiwan or Japan, everyone has an umbrella, and their bag/purse/backpack are waterproof and their shoes are too!

We were hungry but we've missed the regular lunch time so many of the restaurants were closed for lunch already. So we went straight to Animate and spend hours there.

We then had lunch at a ramen place in the south side of Namba City. We ate and chatted for a while before continuing into Carnival Mall.

We did a little more shopping and we headed home around 9:30pm. On our way from the Metro to the train station, we stopped this sushi place that we've walked by yesterday and decided to have dinner there before going back to the hotel.

The sushi was by far the best! The whole meal only cost us USD $71!!!!!