CKS Gardens

A couple of weekends ago, Rich and I visited CKS Gardens - we didn't know that there was an event for the Taipei Floral International on the weekend we decided to go so it was super busy.

It is still a great afternoon though even if it was shared with quite possibly thousands of other people!

Hello Kitty Design Store

Here's something fit for Hello Kitty Hell, the Hello Kitty interior design store. Well I think that's what this store is - the poster shows a number of ways you could turn your house or apartment all pink and kitty like.

Bitan Lake

Recently Rich and I spent an afternoon on Bitan Lake - our form of transport? A rather inefficient swan pedal boat. It looks cute but must be the most ineffective mode of water transport ever.

Snake Alley

The most infamous night market is Huaxi Street Night market or "snake alley". The reasons why it is called snake alley are pretty obvious - you can buy and eat snake here. There's a whole bunch of restaurants where you can go and eat both snakes and turtles. The whole thing is a little unsettling for me - especially when I saw some of the "meat" outside the restaurants.

It's also an area known for it's sex shops - so there were some rather "interesting" stalls at the night market.

It actually says in the lonely planet that snake alley has "cleaned up it's act" in recent years. I don't really want to think about what it used to be like.

On the night we visited the night market, there was some kind of festival happening. The streets were busy with fireworks and puppets and floats. It was sheer craziness.

We saw this show outside of a temple (I think it was a Taoist temple) and I think it was part of the festival.

As you can see the costumes and set were pretty incredible!

Strange dining experiences....

I've visited many many restaurants and cafe's in Asia that you would never find in New Zealand - I've visited two Hello Kitty Cafe's, a Charlie Brown Cafe, numerous super girly and fairly tacky Italian restaurants in Korea, restaurants with swings instead of chairs and I will NEVER forget the maid cafe I visited in Tokyo - that was one of the strangest experiences of my life.

However - a few weeks ago I had a whole new dining experience at the "Modern Toilet Restaurant" in Taipei. Yes, that's right, a toilet themed restaurant.

The food at the restaurant was actually pretty good, so many themed restaurants have terrible food. However, there did seem to be a lot of curry on the menu which I guess fits with the toilet theme.

So let's start with the entrance to the restaurant - it's true they can make anything in asia cute. Including toilets and poo.

Next up is the menu, some restaurants use little symbols to indicate which meals are popular - guess what symbol was used to show popularity in the Modern Toilet Restaurant. Just in case you're wondering what you sit on in a toilet restaurant -here it is! Toilets with delightfully tacky lids. I think my was sunflowers. I know Lisa was very patriotic and got to sit on the American Flag. Next up is the food - here's Rich enjoying his curry directly from a toilet shaped plate. Here's my dinner - its gratin in a bath tub! I actually thought the bath tub was pretty cute.Here's the little envelope our spoons and chopsticks arrived in - it's pretty cute but I think kissing a toilet is always a bad idea.We all bought meals from the set menu, which meant we all had dessert. In the form of an ice cream served in a squatter toilet.

I just thought I'd share a photo of the hand basin - yes - it's a toilet (again).

As we know, any good theme restaurant needs a good merchandise stand. This is the merchandise stand.

No toilet plate is complete without a poo shaped warming cover.
As we were leaving I decided to have a photo taken with the pink poo mascot outside the restaurant. Here's a photo of Lisa and I outside the restaurant - if you ever want to visit the modern toilet in Taipei , just looke out for the giant toilet.

So you would think that visiting a toilet restaurant would fill our quota of strange dining experiences for one night.We thought so too - until we found this sign.

It was a sign for a stall at the night market - what where they selling you may ask? Well they were selling these. In case you were wondering - there is a sausage inside these as well as cheese. Our friend Aaris bought one.

Taipei Botanical Gardens

One of our favourite places in Taipei is the Taipei botanical gardens - here's some photo's from one of our many visits.

One of the very cute things they have in the gardens are little wooden cut outs of Chinese horrorscope animals - here's me with the sheep/goat. I was born in 1979 and I am never sure if it's suppose to be a sheep or a goat! Either way it's pretty darn cute.Here's a couple of other animals - a tiger and a dog.

Finally a photograph of the glass house - although on this day the glass house wasn't the greatest. The reason was mosquito's! They were everywhere and mosquito's like to bite me A LOT. It wasn't too much fun being here!