Taiwan Day 1

For my Taiwan posts, I’ve decided to do short posts to let you know what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis and do longer posts once I return from my trip. I’ll also do longer restaurant posts, give some travel tips, and come up with “best of” lists once I get back and process all of these pictures! For now, a glimpse of our first full day in Taipei!

After Din Tai Fung, my dad took us to Bellavita, a new shopping mall that opened up about six months ago:

The mall has an European-style exterior because supposedly a wealthy mother took her three daughters to Europe and they liked the cafes around the Champs-Elysees so they wanted to open a coffee shop similar to the ones they saw in Paris. Instead of building a little coffee shop, their father decided to build them the Bellavita shopping mall! The mall is pretty quiet because it’s just opening, but has stores like Hermes, Tod’s, Eres, and a lot of other high end stuff you’d find on 5th Avenue in NYC.

In the basement of Bellavita, they sell macarons, French pastries, and mochi:

They also sell cakes that are coated in gold:

To give you an idea of how much the gold cake costs, the exchange rate is about 30 – 32NT = 1 USD. The cake was so small I could’ve eaten it by MYSELF in one sitting!

The area around Bellavita has a lot of different malls and Taipei 101:

After walking around Bellavita, we went to Shing Kong Mitsukoshi, another mall in the area. I thought this cat was cute:

So, in the basement of shopping malls in Asia, they all have really nice food courts where families go to eat after shopping all day. The food courts also have really nice bakeries where you can buy cakes (like the gold cake from Bellavita), gifts, and other delicious edibles. In the Shing Kong Mitsukoshi mall, we were walking around when we saw a huge line form at a bakery. Not knowing what the commotion was about, we asked around and apparently they were having a promotion – one type of bun that usually cost 30 NT was on sale for 10 NT, but only 30 people could take advantage of the promotion. David and I immediately got in line and guess what…I got the last ticket for the reduced price baked good:

David and I were so excited to get the baked good even though we had no idea what it would taste like (although all of the baked goods in Asia are amazing so it’s tough to go wrong). Here’s David with our pastries:

The bun ended up being absolutely delicious – it had a milky-like crumbly crust and the bun was very moist and soft. Good thing we randomly saw a line and got in it!

After walking around the shopping area by Taipei 101, we headed back to the hotel and hung out for a little before meeting up with my cousin and aunt at New York New York:

New York New York is actually right by the Taipei 101 area and is another shopping mall (home of a HUGE Muji store). We had an all-you-can-eat dim sum buffet on the 7th floor of the New York New York shopping mall:

After dinner, we took a cab home and went to the grocery store to pick up some toiletries and gum (peach flavored!) Taiwan Day 2 is coming up!