Chocolate!!

This 30th was centered around chocolate. We had samples of chocolates from different countries including Greece, Germany, China and America. Friends brought us back the chocolates from Germany and Greece. We picked up the chocolate bar in China while we were there. Finally we had chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup from America. The results weren't surprising... Germany had the best chocolate with America placing second. Both Greece and China were pretty bland and tasted a lot like wax.

In order to continue with the theme, we checked out Chocolat from the library and watched it together.

Relaxing Evening in Taipei

The first half of the day was unfortunately spent traveling. We had just spent a week in Shanghai/Hangzhou and were now moving on to Taiwan for my upcoming medical rotation. Although the rotation was in Pingdong in the south, Taipei is the cheapest airport to fly into and also where I served my mission. So chalk up the first half of the day. No matter how you spin it, hauling bags on the subway and around the airport is only so much fun.

We arrived in Taipei around 1PM and took a taxi to the hotel to drop off our bags. Then we hopped on the subway to explore the city. As mentioned, I lived here as a missionary for 2 years and for the most part I knew what I was doing. Our destination was the Taipei 101, the 2nd tallest building in the world. It was the tallest during my time here and was only surpassed in 2009 by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Along the way we stopped at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Dr. Sun is considered the Father of China by both Taiwan and mainland China. He helped overthrow the last emperor of China and establish the first Republic. Despite my previous visits I was not aware of the art exhibits on the upper floors. So we enjoyed the exhibits and also were able to see the changing of the guard.

Afterwards we walked to the Taipei 101, but the wait time to go to the top was about 2 hours since it was Saturday night. Instead we opted to walk around the world-class shopping mall on the bottom floors and do some window-shopping. The A/C was very refreshing compared to the last several sultry days spent in Shanghai. We also found a very good German cafe in the mall. We ordered sandwiches and iced chocolate. Once again, the sandwiches were very refreshing after several days of mostly fried foods. Overall, it was a relaxing evening in a new city.