Winter Travels Pt. 2: Mad about Maokong

After two days in Okinawa, my band of merry JET friends and I headed off to our next winter travel destination, Taipei! We were only there for three days, but managed to pack a lot of adventuring into that short amount of time. I'm pretty sure it was my favorite destination of the three as well, since the food was incredible and the public transportation made it easy to reach all the destinations we wanted to see. I was glad to have been able to do so much in such a short amount of time.

On our first day, we headed up into the mountains in Taipei on the Hello Kitty themed Maokong gondola. Taipei seems to love Kitty Chan just as much as Japan does.

The gondola floats serenely over the city for about fifteen to twenty minutes, with the option to stop and explore different places along the route. Followers of my blog from the Hong Kong days might remember a similar cable car experience I had when I visited Ocean Park, and it did sort of feel like a deja vu moment. Either way, I'm a big fan of the floating over mountaintops public transportation movement. Talk about a way to travel!

Our first stop was Taisui shrine, a huge ornate building covered in dragons, gods and flowers. The shrine had a sort of a one size fits all sort of thing going, as there were different places to pray depending on whether you were followed the Tao, the Buddha or Confucius. You could also buy a token for good luck to hang on your rearview mirror for roughly $8 USD.

This room was my favorite by far. The ceiling was lit to look like the night sky, and in these cases all around the room were different saints for everyone's birth year. We all went around and found our own personal "guardian angels."

Here's my saint-- if you were born in 1992, you have this lovely scholar watching over you. Apparently, my lucky number is 9, my lucky color is purple, and I have a lot of wisdom, if the shrine is to be believed.

After we had our fill of temple gazing, we returned to the gondola and continued up the mountain, eventually arriving at the little town of Maokong. Famous for tea flavoured soba and special Chinese tea tastings, the tea drinking grandma in my heart was very excited at the opportunity.

We picked a random shop and tried an assortment of tea themed snacks, including tea oil noodles, tea meats, and steamed buns (pictured below). 

 My tea set, complete with tea biscuits, tea jelly, and, of course, tea! I tried a new flavour (but since it was written in kanji, I have no idea what it was called). It sort of reminded me of jasmine tea, since it had a very floral taste.

Black sesame, matcha, orange, cranberry and herb flavored steamed buns were a real treat. You can see the tea oil noodles and Elley's beef dish (possibly also made with tea?) in the background.

After we had stuffed ourselves with tea themed dishes and had a mosey around a couple tea shops, we tried a special Taiwanese dessert, the ice cream spring roll. It was taro and pineapple ice cream with shaved peanut brittle and cilantro-- it sounds nuts (haha, get it?), but I definitely recommend it.

The purple ice cream is taro flavoured, the yellow is pineapple. The cilantro made it so refreshing too! 

 Allison and I triumphantly eating spring rolls. 

A view of the town from the gondola platform

The gondola ride was such a treat on our first day in Taiwan, and it's a really inexpensive way to get to have some really unique experiences. If you like tea, Maokong is really the cream of the crop. Or should I say, the cream of the milk tea.

Actually no one should ever say that. Is it just me, or are my jokes getting worse?

I'm not done with Taiwan yet! Stay tuned for the next Winter Travels post to catch up with the rest of our Taiwanese adventures!