Two Days with Tessa Jane

First, a few pics of Tessa Jane. We're slowly but surely getting her to show us her real personality (which can be stubborn!) and genuinely warm up to us. She's completely off of her schedule (which we really don't know what it was supposed to be), so napping and eating and planning around napping and eating has been a bit challenging. Nonetheless, we've continued touring Taiwan and seeing the sights.

We started off yesterday with our appointment at the AIT (embassy). We waited a while and then had to fill out a couple of VERY confusing forms. We were helped by two very nice gentlemen: one a Chinese man in his fifties, the other a middle-aged six foot tall American black man - who spoke fluent Chinese. After we paid the cashier the $385 in crisp American bills (which she checked to make sure weren't counterfeit and got our phone number at the hotel in case they were), we were told everything looked good and to come back the next day for Tessa's passport and visa.

After that we headed to Taipei 101 - currently the tallest building in the world. We ate lunch in the HUGE mall at the base of the tower and then took the world's fastest elevator to the top. 89 stories in 41 seconds... our ears popped 2 or 3 times on the way (the actual building has 101 stories but the observation deck is lower.) Too bad it was a really cloudy day :(


View of the city (or part of it) from the observation deck.

Tessa actually flinched when we got too close to the glass!

The famous damper... this is the gyro-like device that stabilizes the building - even during earthquakes.

Flat Stanley makes another blog appearance.

Next we went to the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial. The memorial was built to honor a really mean, bad dude so the government tried (in vain) to rename it the National Memorial. Unfortunately the entire complex is being renovated so photo ops were limited.

There are some really beautiful gardens surrounding the memorial.

Check out the bruise on her forehead. She thrashes around in her sleep and the crib the hotel provided is teeny weeny. She's now sleeping with us :P

Today we started our day with a visit to AIT to pick up Tessa's passport and visa. After about 30 minutes of waiting, the nice Chinese gentleman who helped us yesterday called us up. We received a boatload of paperwork... the most important being her passport and visa!

Next we went to a quaint little place called the Ping Lin Tea Museum. It is in the outskirts of town up in the mountains. The city was quite overcast but when we got to the mountain area, it was drizzly and rainy. The museum itself is kind of old and musty but the scenery was beautiful.

The koi fish are HUGE!!

Teapots sit atop the barricades on the road to the museum.

We've seen several variations on this scene throughout Taiwan. Each one is slightly different. The first one we saw had a crown-like thing and a long beard. We joked that it was Burger King's grandfather. So now they're all related to Burger King somehow... jet lag :P

Mr. Yeh stopped at this street market so we could get something to eat. He went to a street vendor and ordered what we could TELL was tofu. We were all saying "NO stinky tofu!" He kept gesturing that it was good... OK... no problem. Tami and I agreed to take bites simultaneously. It WASN'T stinky tofu!!! It was some kind of Teriyaki tofu with pickled cabbage on top! It was pretty good!! We walked through the market and sampled lots of other exotic foods. Most of them sweets and pastries - because if we've learned one thing, these are what the Taiwanese do best. Roadside vendors here make better stuff than most of the crazy expensive stuff I've tasted back home.

Tessa is just waking up from her evening nap and we are off to the night market with Ralph and Tami. Hope to pick up some souvenirs!

Tomorrow we head for WuLai Falls. I can't wait! This place is a no-miss... mountains, waterfalls, quaint little aboriginal village and a GONDOLA!!! It's supposed to be overcast again tomorrow so we're hoping we get lucky and get a few sprinkles of sunlight and no rain!

Gotta run! We're having a great time but we're starting to miss some of our creature comforts. I'm pretty sure we'll watch TV for about 10 hours straight when we get home... all we get here is CNN world (did you know South Africa won the world rugby championship?) and the Discovery Channel - which has been running a special on meercats every other hour for the past several days... it was even on in the lobby of the AIT building. Ugh.

We'll post again soon!!