Taipei 101! YAY!

 Yesterday, Katy and I went to Taipei!  (Katy is from the other ILP school.)  We went to the temple first and it was lovely!  I love the temple!

 After the temple, we walked towards Chiang Kai Shek Memorial to get on the MRT (metro).  This picture was taken near Chiang Kai Shek Memorial!  They have Christmas decorations up! YAY!

If you notice the 100 on top of the tree, it is significant. To the Taiwanese, it is the year 99.  On New Years Day of 2011, it will be the year 100.  That's a big year.  100 years since Taiwan became a Republic of China.

After our little detour with the Christmas tree, we rode the MRT to Taipei 101! 

Taipei 101!  I think it's a beautiful building! 

Almost there!

Yay!  We made it to Taipei 101!  The second tallest building in the world!  We had already been here (which you can read about here) but we did not make it to the top before!

Inside was this lovely Christmas tree!  And they had Christmas music playing overhead! 

We got our tickets and waited in line to go to the top!  When we bought our tickets, the man informed us that there was a 90-minute wait to get to the top.  But it was worth it to us, because we had waited four months to get to the top of Taipei 101.

Part of the line to get to the top!  We ended up only having to wait about an hour in line.  It really wasn't that bad.  And it was so worth it!

We made it to the top!  You have no idea how happy I was about that!  We finally made it to the top after four months!  

The lights were beautiful! I really liked seeing it at night time! 

These two pictures are similar, but I liked them both! 

I liked the picture of this lady taking a picture of her son with the reindeer on top of Taipei 101. (with a picture of the building in the background:)

Read this!  I laughed when I saw it :)  I wish we would have seen some window washers!

Christmas and the city below (you can kind of see the lights outside the window!)

So they had this thing called a damper inside the building which we could get close to.  Dampers help keep tall buildings and other things from moving when it is windy!

The poster in this picture is of a mini-damper with a name (Smart Silver). I'm not quite sure about them, but in the gift shop they had stuffed dampers and key chains and glass figures like the one on the poster.  They had different ones, all with different names and personality traits.  It was special. They were kind of cute, but special ;)

 

The damper of the Taipei 101 from above! Doesn't it look like a spaceship from an alien movie or something?! :)

 

Here are some facts about the damper! 

 

Just in case I hadn't said this already I was really excited to be at the top of Taipei 101!  This picture is from the observation deck!

The lights are beautiful!   The observation deck!

YAY! 

Look at the city!  It's Taipei!

On the same level with the damper and the mini-damper!

The bottom of the damper! That thing is intense!

So Taipei 101 also has the fastest elevator in the world! (At least I think it is the fastest still).  This is a screen inside of the elevator showing us how fast we were going and how long we had been in there.  This picture was on the way down. 

The elevator took us from the fifth floor to the 89th floor in 37 seconds!  I could hardly tell we were moving. It was so smooth and fast!  It took us down from the 89th floor to the fifth floor in about 45 seconds or so.

The view from below after we were done at the top! I loved Taipei 101! 

We took the MRT back to the bus station after we got done with Taipei 101 and headed home!