Taipei

One of our goals for this year is to travel {at least} four times.  We have so many places we want to visit and explore while we're here, four trips a year might not even be enough!  Since Nora is still pretty young, we want to keep most of our trips relatively close - like three hours flights or less.  For our first trip of the year we headed to Taipei, Taiwan!  Unfortunately it was cold & rainy the whole time we were there, but we didn't let it slow us down.  All I can say is thank goodness for good rain boots! 

Da'an Forest Park

Our first day we explored the neighborhood where we were staying.  Let me back up a bit though, as soon as we were pulling into the airport in Okinawa, I realized I forgot to put the Ergo in the car.  Cue a major "oh crap moment!"  We knew we would be doing a lot of walking and trying to wrangle our spirited 18 month old can be a challenge to say the least.  But kids always surprise you.  Nora did so great walking through the city, holding hands when we crossed the street, staying on the sidewalk.  It's amazing what a few months can do for a child, how much they grow up in such a short amount of time.  We were so impressed!

 
This was Nora's first time seeing squirrels (there aren't squirrels on Okinawa) and she was pretty curious about them.  These were some seriously friendly squirrels too!  If we had any food on us, I'm sure they would have eaten out of our hands.  

Day two we hit the Taipei Zoo and Taipei 101.  Our animal loving girl loved the zoo!  Every time we would start to walk away to another animal exhibit, she kept saying "more, more" and wanting us to stay where we were.  I think her favorite was seeing the elephants. 

This just made me giggle :)

Taipei 101 was the tallest building in the world from 2004-2009.  It was so cloudy and foggy from the rain so we weren't able to get the beautiful, sweeping views of the city, but it was still amazing!  The elevator ride from the 5th floor to the 89th is one of the fastest in the world - we were up in less than a minute! 

For our last day, we took the Maokong Gondola up the mountain to check out the tea village and explore.  Again, it was rainy & foggy, so we didn't get great pictures, but it was a nice ride up and we didn't have to wait in a long line to get up there (a lot of friends said they had waited over an hour!).  There wasn't much to do once we got off at the top, but the scenery was beautiful and we just enjoyed walking around (and Nora splashed in lots of puddles).  

Waiting for the gondola - all the locals in line with us were swooning over Nora  

We had planned to check out the national park that day as well, but with all the rain, we figured it might be a bust.  So we ended up finding the coolest market (that's the only way I know how to explain it) called Maji.  It had tons of restaurants and shops (I even found fresh pressed juice - yay!).  We ended up staying there the rest of the day. 

Nora's first carousel ride 

Just a cat in a purse, aka, Nora's dream.

Even with the cold & rain, this trip was great.  It was so wonderful to see how well Nora did compared to our trip to Kyoto a few months before.  There were no meltdowns and she really went with the flow.  I can't wait to keep traveling with her!