Glitz of my life: Taiwan 2015 Day 3: [[ Taichung 台中 ]]

Day 3, we headed down south to Taichung. It is an hour train ride from Taipei. As it was a week day, we headed to the station to purchase our ticket. We managed to get assigned seats tickets.

Our breakfast from Macdonalds. It was so good! Not the most filling though.

Once we arrived at HSR Taichung train station, we headed out to hail a taxi to rainbow village. The transport system in Taichung is pretty bad with buses coming by very infrequently and no internal train services! Taxi is the way to go. Hence, the taxi drivers there are pretty much like those in Bangkok where they will not want to on meter/meter is modified. Lots of haggering is required.

One advice is, do book the taxi in advance before your trip if possible. We totally regretted not doing so.

Rainbow Village 彩虹卷村

台中市南屯區春安路56巷2號

Rainbow village is a very small area which used to be a military's dependent village. After it was no longer in use, grandpa rainbow (that's who he is known as) started painting the walls of the village. Today, he is still living within hence if you are lucky, you will get to meet him!

Entry to the village is free. Do donate a little to Grandpa Rainbow by purchasing some of the items that are on sales. Rainbow village is rather small. Half an hour to an hour is all it needs to finish exploring.

Yups! That's Grandpa Rainbow! We purchased some magnets from him. :)

Next we wanted to bus down to the 921 Earthquake Museum. However, no bus stop/busses were insight. Hence, we flag down a taxi and headed to the museum which was about 30 to 45 minutes.

The taxi driver offered to wait and take us to another destination at a flat exorbidant price. Despite knowing that he is out to con us, we accepted the offer because the place looked really ulu and hard to get to the city area.

Lesson learnt. Enough said.

921 Earthquake Museum 921地震教育園區

41364 臺中市霧峰區坑口里中正路46號

Admission fee: NT50

We took our own sweet time to explore the museum since we paid such an exorbidant price for the trip here and we wanted to sort of get back at the con man by making him enjoy his sun tan session in his taxi! :x

The museum was fortunately, very worth the trip. It was very informative. As well, the exhibits were real, right from the site itself which used to house a school. Seeing the destroyed school made us feel very fortunate that Singapore doesn't have such natural disasters.

We spent a good whole 2hours exploring every part of the museum. We even contemplated to have our early lunch there at the little cafe. Unfortunately, the food seems unappealing.

The taxi driver dropped us off at the shopping street yizhongjie 一中街 and off we went to look for lunch. There were really not much choices. Mostly were street snacks. Restaurants were of limited choices. We ended up eating pasta.

After lunch, we walked the shopping streets and to my dismay, nothing caught my eyes. Only place which I bought stuff was from this cute little ahop called 86shop. It's a shopping heaven for beauty products buffers! They sell all kind of skincare, bodycare and make up products. Prices were reasonable too! Highly recommended!

After I'm done with my much needed shopping, we wondered the streets in determination to find the right bus to the Miyahara 宫原眼科 for the famous ice cream and also, to purchase some Dawn's pineapple tarts which is constantly recommended on all Taichung blog posts!

We finally found the bus stop and bus to take after asking around. While waiting for the bus, we bought a grilled muachee to snack. Ummm... not very nice! Lol. It's now available in Singapore though. Do try for its novelty.

Finally the bus came after some 30minutes wait.

Miyahara 宫原眼科
台中市中区中山路20号
Open: 10am to 10pm

Miyahara is located just across the streets from the Taichung railway station. Please note that this is a different station from HSR train station which we arrived from. If you are lost, ask around and people will be able to direct you too Miyahara.

Dawn's flagship is just beside Miyahara. It is hard to miss it since there is alway a zillion people hanging around!

We headed in to Dawn to have a look before deciding to join the long queue for Miyahara first since we were kind of running late.

We queued for 45minutes before we got to eat the long awaited, widely raved about, ice cream! Was it worth it?

YES!!!

It is so damn awesome. With a variety of flavourings and toppings to choose from. While queuing, everyone will be given a paper menu to review before the staff comes to take the order. Pretty efficient.

Being Singaporeans, making our time worthwhile, we ordered a waffles cup combo with 3 ice creams and toppings. Hilariously huge but surprisingly, we finished the ice cream with ease.

The very happy me! :)

It was 8pm by the time we were done eating. We rushed off to the rail station to take an internal train back to HSR train station. It was pretty chaotic but much more managable as compared to our Day 1!

Horror struck when the assigned tickets were all sold out! Even for the last train. We were forced to buy the non assigned seats. We were lucky, both of us, although sit separately, managed to find seats for the hour journey!

Once back in Taipei, we were so hungry, we settled down in 7-11 to have cup noodles.

We ended the day with a stroll back to our hotel. We bought a waffle to share from a shop we pass by everyday but never had the chance to try. Well, everything happened for a reason and the reason we never had a chance previously is a hint that it is not nice! Lol.