On the 3rd day of our Taiwan trip, we took a bus to Ruifang District to visit Jiu Fen Old Street which is located up in the mountains
We took a direct bus from Zhongxiao Fuxing, which took about 30 minutes to arrive at the destination
This place is a massive local/tourist attraction in Taiwan cause it's just so cool!
You get that nostalgic feeling while roaming around this place
There's also heaps of shops for your shopping and eating pleasure :)
Let's go in!
The entire street is just filled with rustic shops with wonderful decoration
Exploring this place was really enjoyable
I have no idea what's inside the bottles LOL
Just looked pretty cool and interesting
#pacifier
Yummy fish ballsss!
Our lunch!
Fishball soup is actually quite common and popular in Taiwan
I had fishball soup like twice during the trip
#yum
Halfway through the street we saw this shop exclusively sells maneki-neko
(a.k.a beckoning cat, lucky cat, fortune cat)
They had this wall where everyone could write down their wishes if they bought something from their shop
Every single cat has words written on them to promote/enhance various attributes in life
The most common ones are lucky, wealth, health, love
Look at all these cats!
And this is only a small section
The entire shop was filled with maneki-neko's
Really fascinating :O
With this one being the most fascinating LOL
Not sure if that's suppose to be cute or scary
Maybe both
I usually don't buy things like this but this shop was just so amazing I felt like I had to get one :D
I ended up buying one cat that looked really chilled out and represented both money and 'dreams come true'
We continued strolling along the street and we came across this little place called Sky Castle Teahouse!
(What a great name for a teahouse, feels like I'm in a anime movie)
I saw that they were using charcoal to boil their hot water and I thought it looked really cool
(I'm a sucker when it comes to trying new things)
So we decided to chill, relax and sip some tea while being up in the mountains :)
They had a set of guidelines on how to make tea
Our waitress explained the method in Chinese and I just relied on MPY hoping she actually understood everything LOL
(I can't speak nor understand chinese)
According to MPY, they said for every handful of tea it's recommended that we only pour the hot water into the teapot for a certain amount of time before pouring it out into another pot
This is to avoid over-soaking of the tea leaves
They said the first soak should be about 15 seconds
Then 10 seconds for the second time and 5 seconds for the next 4 times.
This is to ensure that we are able to get the most out of the tea leaves for a maximum of 6 serves
It was super relaxing just sipping tea and nibbling on green tea biscuits
I even zoned out into complete tranquility for a short period of time
I saw this funny looking figurine when I entered the teahouse
I thought it looked really hideous LOL
Reminds me of squidward
But the more I look at it the more I like it
MPY told me that it's actually a cat
And it's actually to represent our table number which was labelled at the bottom
#sothatswhy
On the right is my adorable mouse ring that I bought for 180TWD = $6 :D
Apparently it's able 'to bring me money from the outside'
#imgonnaberich :P
Our view!
We managed to grab a seat outside and we could enjoy the fresh air as well as the scenery
#teaselfie
If I'm not wrong I think we managed to finish about 12 serves of the teapot in 1.5 hours
My bladder was seriously full by then
I have a small bladder so I had to continuously look for a toilet after we were finished LOL
#fml
Okay that's all I have for this blogpost!
I had an amazing time in Jiu Fen
It was one of the best place I visited in Taiwan
The Sky Caste Teahouse was also an unforgettable experience
I seriously had the best time :)
#highlyrecommended
#pleasebringmeback
