Day 7 - Last day in Taiwan, exploring Taipei the capital city

Travelling date: 15th December 2018. We sent a message to the house owner saying that we will collect our bags later in the evening as our flight is at night. She said its fine for us to drop the key at her mail box as she understood teh hassle to bring all the luggage along with us while exploring Taipei city for the last time. After we've done with packing, locked our luggage, we took the rented Vios to Da’an district to drop the car. Things didn’t go right as right after Syahirah took the car from her father she accidently scratched a taxi and caused a traffic jam. The police came to arbitrate the matter and Hotai Car Leasing took the case into their hand as the rent included the insurance. Hubby had to pay an extra penalty for the loss that the rental company had while the car was under repaired. Nasrul and I let the 2 of them, father and daughter to resolve their dispute among themselves.

We walked toward the left hand side of the shops row trying to find a good place to eat. There is a restaurant that served Malaysian food somewhere there. Although it wasn’t a halal restaurant, the owner cum chef willing to friend Mee Goreng mamak without meat and/or other un-halal ingredients for us. The food is not cheap but the taste is good, hence no complaint paying more for something that you truly enjoyed at the end of the day. The restaurant belong to a Chinese Malaysian man married to local Taiwanese lady. It has its own crowd and are doing well.

Thereafter, we took a public transport, train from Technology Building station still in Da’an District to a famous shopping area in Ximending which is located in Wanhua District. We made friends along the way. This place was so crowded with local and tourist as it is a tourist attraction area. By the way, Ximending literally means "West Gate District" as it once was a suburb near the historical west gate of the old city, commonly described as the Shibuya or Harajuku of Taipei, in reference to these youth-centric districts of Tokyo. It first re-launched in 1999 as a walkable, people friendly area and subsequently expanded. It is true that Ximending is one of the places that secondary school students, university students, and other hip, young people (and too many tourists) go to eat, drink, shop, enjoy music and movies, and people watch in Taipei, just as they do in these areas of Tokyo.

However, Ximending's main walking areas, described as "Xi Men Walker" when translated into English on signs in the area according to Taiwanese are much better than most of Shibuya's back streets. The best of Ximending has been purposefully designed for people with more modest scale, street trees, attractive pavers, and helpful signage. There's so much to see in Ximending, ranging from the famous Red House theatre, music venue, and creative street market to restaurants and plenty of tiny boutiques, street food etc. We did a last minute shopping buying souvenirs and clothes to finish off our Taiwanese dollar before heading home. We visited few other places that I already forgotten about as the trip was 2 years ago. Will not prolong any entries in the future anymore, therefore, I hope, I oblige... sigh!

By 5pm, we were ready to go back to our accommodation, collected the bag and took a cab to the airport. We had a nice cool dinner with a decent food at the airport after check-in our luggage. It was around 8pm and at 10.30pm we found a comfortable place to pray, musolla sort of thing that was provided in the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport not far from the boarding gate to our plane. That’s wrap our story in Taiwan.