January in Taipei - Anna Wu Photography

We’ve finally reached the final post of our Taiwan & Japan travels from this winter! Rewinding a bit from the Japan portion of our tour, we circle back to January first, in Taipei. After having watched the famous Taipei 101 fireworks the night before from our friends’ place out on the west side, we ventured up to the roof of our own hotel and realized we actually had a pretty good view of Taipei 101 ourselves. Oh well, it was fun to watch it with them!

Haircut and color in the neighborhood.

Jinjiang Tea House, a Hakka restaurant that we saw Clarissa Wei recommend once! It was great, we snuck in right before closing time for the afternoon.

A fancy tea stop, and then we visited the Huashan Cultural Park.

A favorite shop by a local magazine.

Alex got a canvas colored version of this tote, and I got three sizes of their super lightweight packing cubes.

Lots of local makers and cute shops within the Huashan Cultural Park.

Back near National Taiwan University where were staying, casual street eats abound.

Then we headed to Japan for two weeks! See all the other posts here. Here’s the departure and the return.

Waiting to check in to our Taipei hotel for the second leg, we dropped off our bags and went to have a quick afternoon tea at QinTian cafe.

Then we had to hustle to make it out to Ximen for our cooking class at CookInn Taiwan! They have a bunch of different food class offerings that are generally best to book ahead, but we opted for a simpler self-led iPad version where we got to make pineapple cakes.

They already made the pineapple and wintermelon fillings (honestly, the hardest part), but we had fun mixing the dough and assembling the pineapple cakes.

And wow, they were so, so good fresh out of the oven!

Excellent gift packaging to take it all home! Plus Alex’s fried chicken snack followup even though we were headed to Taipei Main Station to meet up with our friend for dinner next.

San Franciscans meeting up in Taipei, we like it.

A Taiwan trip must — beef noodle soup. ZhengWu Beef Noodles. They offer every kind of customization, but I went with pretty basic choices through and through.

Then we took a long bus ride all the way up to TianMu to go meet up with my family at an all-vegetarian buffet, ???. They had some very impressive offerings and everything looked delicious, but we had already eaten lunch, so I focused on fruits and desserts, haha.

Tianmu baseball stadium sighting on the way to the bus afterwards.

We went right to another family gathering and more food, this time a northern Chinese style of hotpot with Alex’s family. There’s a big metal cone in the middle of the pot that holds the charcoal, and the soup is sour… I had never had this style before!

Rainy day wanderings, “Love TPE”.

Spotted inside the department store: tiny mahjong embroidered pins, and a whole mahjong-themed pineapple cake set! Brought both back to the states with us.

Coach has its own cafe-shop in the Chifeng Street shopping area.

There was a whole festival with a bunch of indie booths as well. The area was pretty packed for a January weekend.

Final dinner, we opted to go Taiwanese American with Taihu Brewing, which offers legit burgers and of course beer. Pretty great after nearly a month in Asia.

A stroll through Daan Park on our final morning in Taiwan. I watercolored the funny exercise water fountain contraption, until the mosquitos started coming after me.

A must-do I hadn’t fulfilled until now, getting a tea egg from 7/11.

Followed by a classic – DinTaiFung. Our second of the trip, the previous time being in Nagoya, Japan, ha.

And that was it! We went back to the hotel, packed up our seven bags, and headed to TPE where we picked up Kavalan and Sunny Hills pineapple cakes and went on our merry way back home.

Such a privilege to be able to spend a month in Taiwan and Japan– and then to return to Tokyo just a couple months later, haha. More on that to come. But visit the series below to recap our whole winter trip!

Anna Wu is a wedding and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. She compulsively documents and blogs all of her daily adventures. Follow her on instagram and view more of her professional work at annawu.com.

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