26 May 2011
Day 3 of our trip, I could not find my contact lens. I was wearing it the day before and suddenly it disappeared from my contact lens case. Anyway, we had breakfast at Hualien Charming City Hotel.
After that, we checked out of the hotel and walked to the railway station under the drizzle. So, we took the train to Taipei and then HSR to Taichung. You may ask why bother to go back to Taipei then Taichung. It is because there isn’t any train from Hualien all the way to Taichung. At the Hualien station, we got some local goodies such as muah chee.
Look at the time 10:07am. We learnt our lesson after missing our first train to Hualien. So we went to the platform earlier even though our ride was at 10:35am. It was very scary as we got to find the right platform to take our train. Our train ride to Taipei costs NTD 792 which is SGD34.88.
After reaching Taipei Main Station, we took the High Speed Rail to Taichung HSR station, which is at 新乌日车站. See our ticket from Taipei to Taichung, it costs us NTD490 after 30% discount cause we booked our ride before we left Singapore. After reaching 新乌日车站, we took another train to 台中车站.
From there, we took the cab to our hotel which is 金满家大饭店 (167, Wuyi Street, Taichung, Taiwan). It costs SGD$27.02 per pax per night for a triple-bed room. What’s good about this hotel? WIFI in our rooms! All of us started to spam our whatsapp, twitter and facebook after disconnected from the world for a couple of days.
After checking in to our hotel and put our luggage back to our hotel rooms, we went to 逢甲夜市. The taxi driver stopped us at the roadside, just outside an optical shop. So I went to purchase my contact lens there.
Chicken feet? My friends were crazily in love with it. They have different levels of spiciness (小辣，中辣，无辣). This was my first time trying them and it was not as bad as what I thought. All of us got so addicted that we kept buying boxes and boxes of these boneless chicken feet.
Tried 猪雪糕 before? It is also called pig’s blood cake. At first I dont really want to eat because the name is already disgusting enough, but since I’m already here, I must be adventurous right? Must try right? When I started to have a bite on it, my friends wanted to take the picture with it. So I stopped eating and let them take a picture. OH MAN, I really regretted that time. I can see the red bloody blood on the cake itself. Eeks..
After that, we took a cab back to our hotel. We got suspicious after ten minutes because we didnt take such a long time to travel from our hotel to the night market earlier on. So I started to communicate with my friends in english (thank God for this language), and we were discussing about it. In the end, I couldnt tolerate but just tell the taxi driver that I need to make an urgent call back at the hotel. The taxi driver then started to accelerate faster. When we reached the hotel, we verified with the receptionist of the roads we passed by and found out that the taxi driver drove a big round.
