So this is the lobby of the Taiwan Grand Hotel

It literally feels like a Chinese palace.

look, everything is RED

so many red pillars…

The outside looks like you are entering some kind of kingdom…

some ancient kingdom, it looks insane!

I literally love this hotel It’s been...actually its my first day here but its really awesome

Here is Dan Dan!

Hey, whats up.

Dan is my Taiwanese guy so he knows where to go, what to do

So we are going to go to Jiufen

It is like $2,000 NTD to get there and back in here

It’s like an hour car ride there and then an hour back

$2,000 NTD is like 6,000-7,000 yen or around $60-70 US

So we will see you guys there

So right now we are in Jiufen, we have landed

beautiful view

Kind of crazy. I think you don't really recognize or

For me at least I didn't think taiwan was so green, but it there's so much nature

everywhere

That temple were like in the middle of the forest as you guys saw or a temple Shrine temple

yeah, we think temple but

It was absolutely gorgeous. It was like sticking out of the forest

Looked kind of crazy but we have another beautiful scene so we will see you guys there

I don’t think you realize how much of a mountain Taiwan is

Like one giant Mountain no wonder Daniel is so fit

Yeah DanDan

But Taiwan mountain #1!

You are sweating

So this uphill is literally

Just stairs with restaurants and souvenir shops lining

So many people and it's so humid. I'm dripping sweat

but I’m not the only one, Dan is dripping sweat too

We are dripping sweat buddies

This is so cool though. It just keeps going up

Oh my god

Alright, so now. We're gonna try yu yuan

Yu yuan...Its basically like ice, a slushy looking ice with fruit slices, mochi balls or taro balls

I haven't tried it yet, but I think I look like a much of all kind of thing plus red bean paste or "anko"

There is a lot of influence from Japanese culture here so…

Yeah, like mochi balls

Really good. And its so good right now because its so hot. This ice is really refreshing

Its only 45 NTD for one

We are trying sweet seaweed

Whoa? Oh I know what this is. My grandma used to make this

That's good

It's like Jell-O

Not jello!

It tastes like anindofu

Right right, so what you do is you boil that block and then you put ice in it...

And then you can drink it like that

That's good

so

We're still walking in the alleyway, Taiwanese people are so nice...I like Taiwanese people

Ohhhh, boba tea, milk tea!

Okay, it's bigger than my hands whoa

Look how big this is, as big as my face. Only about 260 yen of around $2.60US

for the country known for the best

Yeah, oh, yeah

We have made it to Shifen, Shifen Old Street

Shifen Old Street and we are on another suspension bridge

And I really don't like suspension bridges as you can see it's shaking already. Well my hair looks crazy

It's been like raining on and off constantly here

And then this place is actually famous for like kind of lantern thing you like put a lantern a fire under a small lantern

You let it go up in the sky and you can make a wish or something right?

Yeah, you can write something on it. Yeah kind of cool. We're gonna try that

So this place has a bunch of cool

Shops and restaurants and cafes as well

Just like Jiufen

Everything is like so much eating here. I love it food here is great so many choices

except it rains like very very often

All right, we went across a fried ice cream place

I gotta get my ice cream course right?

That's so good imagine like tempura and like ice cream

The Shifen area was pretty awesome and a nice get away from the busy Taipei city vibe

After we got dropped off from the taxi back towards our hotel

We took the subway to our next location which was very convenient and easy to use

There were English translations for most of the prompts on the screen making ticket purchases very efficient

You get a poker chip looking like coin, that you'll tap on a ticket gate and later use for the exit gate as well.

I was very eager to arrive at our next stop as it was supposed to be absolutely enormous

Whatup guys so right now we are outside of chiang Kai-shek

National Memorial Hall, which is it covers around over 240,000 square meters, so it is absolutely huge

The main Entrance is right here

And it's designated to the former president of the republic of China. His name is chiang Kai-shek

Hence chiang Kai-shek memorial hall and here's like a very prominent a military leader

in

Taiwan History, or the Republic of China and

He died at 1975 so that's actually kind of recent. But um yeah, there's a lot of good history. You can see here

There's a lot of like soldiers

Walking around it's actually like a big event right now with a bunch of soldiers...

like children...?

students...?

Get in here buddy. Get in here. They're high school students doing what um

Marching performance doing stuff and yeah, then after this we're going to go to

Hsing Tian Kong

Which is a temple for that that's devoted to the god of business here in Taiwan, and that covers over 70,000 square meters

So these places are really really really big

Yeah

We have made it to elephant Mountain aka Xiangshen

It's called Elephant Mountain because the mountain looks like an elephant head

He's Taiwanese, I'm not even Taiwanese and I know...

We will see you guys up on the mountain..

so we have been climbing for like 3 minutes...

and Elephant Mountain

is just a buttload of stairs

Look at that. This is a never-ending Elephant Mountain...

Actually it just keeps getting steeper and steeper each step is getting longer and longer making for a deeper squat. How one else nothing

Taiwan Elephant Mountain trying to kill tourists one step at a time...

At the top of Elephant Mountain was an absolutely gorgeous view of the City minus the weather

When people talk about how good taiwanese food is they are definitely not kidding around

The Hike was a perfect way to burn all those calories we gained while here in Taiwan

We couldn't stop eating on this trip as every meal seemed to get better than the last

I don't think I've ever been on a trip that was centered around delicious food, but I'm glad I now have that experience

On our last day we decided to take the train to the airport

near Taipei station, which has direct access to the airport terminal making for a very easy return home

the process of purchasing the ticket is the same as buying a ticket on the normal train. The price was very cheap and

definitely something you should take advantage of if you make your way down here

All right guys that's going to wrap it up for kind of like an explore Taiwan video. We had a ton of fun

I absolutely love taiwan [um] I think it's just rightfully correct to end it with some tapioca since uh tapioca or

boba tea, or I guess pearls tapioca pearls or however you want to call them originated from Taiwan

we did so much from eating so much food to hiking to going to the countryside of Taiwan, not countryside, but like kind of

outside of the main city in Jiufen on the first day was absolutely great. We also went on a hike to Elephant Mountain

We went shopping. We got a massage. We got everything Taiwan is absolutely.. I literally absolutely love it

I want to come back and check out the other cities Taichung and Tainan

Tainan is down south and Taicheng is in between Tainan and Taipei

So I hope you guys enjoyed this video even though its not Japan related

But I hope you guys can support it and kind of enjoy the Taiwan vlogs because I would love to come back here

So yeah anyways, please like comment share and subscribe, and we'll see you guys in the next video. Bye

All right, so we are trying pork blood cake

Want to explain this? Can you tell me what this is?