12th wedding anniversary in Taipei

Mark and I celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary in Taipei, Taiwan this past weekend. I was in Taiwan for work all week, so Mark joined me on Friday for the weekend. Overall, Taiwan is very similar to HK, but the people are more smiley and the city is spread out and huge like Seoul or LA.

The biggest attraction in Taipei is Taipei 101, which is the tallest building in the world until the new one in Dubai takes away the title (any day now)






They had a list of the top 10 tallest buildings and it's interesting to see we could soon cross them all off our list.

Building, city	Year	Sto- ries	Height
			Rank	m	ft
1.	Burj Dubai, Dubai, The United Arab Emirates3	2009 (est.)	167	818	2,313
2.	Taipei 101, Taipei, Taiwan	2004	101	508	1,667
3.	Petronas Tower 1, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia	1998	88	452	1,483
4.	Petronas Tower 2, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia	1998	88	452	1,483
5.	Sears Tower, Chicago	1974	110	442	1,451
6.	Jin Mao Building, Shanghai	1999	88	421	1,381
7.	Two International Finance Centre, Hong Kong	2003	88	415	1,362
8.	CITIC Plaza, Guangzhou, China	1996	80	391	1,283
9.	Shun Hing Square, Shenzhen, China	1996	69	384	1,260
10.	Empire State Building, New York	1931	102	381	1,250
11.	Central Plaza, Hong Kong	1992	78	374	1,227
12.	Bank of China, Hong Kong	1989	70	367	1,205

Taipei 101 is cool because they built it with this huge damper ball in the middle which helps keep it stable during wind, typhoons and earthquakes. I can attest it works because I didn't even feel dizzy at the top like I have when at other tall buildings like the Sears Tower. Here's Mark next to the damper ball.

Taipei night markets
Other sights in Taiwan are the numorous night markets that have lots of odd snack foods on a stick. Mostly innards and gross stuff, but I did find some candy coated strawberries to test. Result..thumbs up!

This guy was crushing sugar canes for what purpose I don't know, but he had a giant garbage bag full of the stuff.


After checking out the night market, we went to dinner at a very local hot pot restaurant for our anniversary dinner. (top picture)


And, here's some Chinese Street Opera we passed at the night market.



Potty Mouth
Along the road to the night market, we passed a popular theme restaurant which serves its food in toilet shaped bowls and you sit on toilets instead of chairs. Chocolate sundae anyone?

I tried to get Mark to stop for a snack since I thought it would be right up his alley but he wasn't interested. Instead I was a nerdy tourist and took a picture.

Taiwan SPCA and animal shelters

Leave it to me to be in Taiwan for 2 days and be able able to sniff out a pet fair. While Mark was napping on Saturday, I took a stroll and came across this pet fair for local Taiwan animal rescue groups. This beagle mix had an odd pattern shaved on him (check out his tail). Weird, but he didn't seem to mind.

Taiwan has a bad problem with pet stores and puppy mills so it's nice to see the animal shelters are active and trying to educate people. At all the night markets, they sell cages and cages of puppies which are way too tiny to be away from their mommies. So sad.



Gondola ride
On Sunday, we took a ride on some Gondolas in the more rural part of Taipei. Pretty views away from the city pollution.

Fang's Dumplings
Lastly, here's a pic of me with some coworkers from earlier in the week while we enjoyed the famous Taiwanese Fang's dumplings.