Taipei, Taiwan

After illegally being in Thailand for four days and a fine of 2000 baht I was on my way to Taiwan.  I was greeted warmly by Julia and Lucie, an exchange student from France.
After hopping on a bus and catching the tram we went to Ximending which is a big shopping district.  On the bus we were talking about the differences between Thailand and Taiwan and their love for 7/11.  This was not knowing the guy beside us was from Thailand and worked for the 7/11 corporation.  The rest of the ride was spent mingling with him, talking about traveling.  Ximending is like New York but Chinese. Its a very popular spot for teens.  Julia introduced me to some guy exchange students that we ran into. Ironically one of the guys had sisters living in Thailand and had picked up a bit of the language from them.

As we were about to go on our way all the street venders started running towards us.  Confused we escaped to watch the chaos at a safe distance.  One of the guy exchange students mentioned that the police were coming and explained further that it was illegal to sell stuff as they were.  They all ran in a herd pushing their carts, shoving civilians out of the way, only to come right back after the police had turned around.  They didn't even wait for him to be out of sight!  They reminded me of a bunch of hermit crabs all hurrying into their burrows only to emerge seconds later as one.  During Julia's six months she has been in Taiwan this was the first time she had seen this happen.  I had only arrived an hour before.

For dinner we had dumplings, which were sooooo goooood!!  For ten dumplings it costs approximately $1.50!  Got to love Asia.  Julia and Lucie were trying to read the menu and couldn't remember which word was for fried or boiled.  Julia decided to ask two guys across from us, who just happened to be Japanese.  They still were able to help us though.  For dessert we had pearl milk tea which was really good, but which I apparently drank wrong since all the Jelly ended up being left at the end.
Once we were back at Julia's place at eleven o'clock her host dad asked us if we would like to go see the big pig which they were going to sacrifice tomorrow.  It happened to be just down the road and was massive.  It weighed 700kg!  It couldn't walk and wasn't even able to feed itself since it was so big.  The owners fed it with a shovel.  We went back home, slept for an hour and woke up to watch them slaughter it.