Well, I’m back home in Vancouver from my trip to Taiwan. Arriving at the Vancouver International Airport, China Airlines lost one of my luggage items, but it was thankfully found a few hours later and they delivered it to my home. To wrap my visit to Taiwan, I’ve put together two more videos from my excursions.

If you’ve been following my blog the last few days, then you may have already seen the video of some Taipei food adventures, as well as several photos from in and around Taipei. Well, this time around, we can take a look at the Shilin Night Market and the observation deck from atop the Taipei 101.

Shilin Night Market

First, the Shilin Night Market is similar in scope to the Summer Night Market (“Richmond Night Market”), but it is substantially larger in scope and it operates all year round. There are food stands set up just about everywhere, in addition to the many shops and stores that line the streets.

The mass of people can be overwhelming for the uninitiated, since pedestrians can easily spill over into the roads, walking right alongside the scooters and cars as they go whizzing by. Transversing our way through Shilin Night Market with Rose, Josh, and Stephen for about three hours, we barely covered about half of the ground. We didn’t even really have a chance to check out the stores, aside from one baby shop where Stephen bought a couple bibs.

Finding a place to sit and eat can be challenging too. We ended up sitting on the front steps of a temple that happened to be in the middle of Shilin Night Market. The temple was closed, of course, but we were greeted by several temple cats looking for scraps. I thought that was interesting. Anyway, here’s the video:

Taipei 101 Observation Deck

The second video is from our ascent of the Taipei 101. To my knowledge, it is the currently the second tallest building in the world, being recently dethroned by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. As its name implies, the Taipei 101 has 101 floors, but the observation deck is only on the 89th floor.

We weren’t able to go to the outside viewing area a couple more floors up due to “inclement weather.” Here’s the video of that, accompanied by some of the free “audio tour” information.

Be sure to check out my Flickr photostream where I have uploaded several pictures from Taipei, including the Hello Kitty gate at Taoyuan International Airport. Yes, there is a gate that is completely covered in Hello Kitty. It’s mildly disturbing.

My travels are not yet complete for the summer. I will once again be heading back on a plane on Sunday, this time bound for Los Angeles for E3 Expo. Flying to LA isn’t quite as exciting as Taipei, but I’m sure I’ll find a few places to have some fun. 🙂