Visit to Tamsui (淡水 半日游)

My main itineraries for the day during my first Taipei trip was to:

Visit The Red Castle (红楼)
Visit The schools
Eat the famous A-Gei (阿给)
Visit The weird museum (搜奇博物馆)
Watch the Sunset at the Fishermen's Wharf (渔人码头)

Before you visit that place, make sure that you had downloaded the Taiwan Tourism board's flyer on Tamsui where it shares with you the various places to visit and other details.

As mentioned previously, during our visit to Mika Coffee for lunch, the friendly uncle gave us these 2 slips of notes :D

Alighting at the Tamsui MRT Station (淡水捷运站) in Taipei (台北), I notice quite a number of portrait painting booths.

Most importantly, we need to take a photo of the Tamsui Map to help navigate around the area

As the A-Gei (阿给) shop closes at 3pm, we hurried to locate that place and have a taste of the food.

Address: 6-1号淡水真理街，台北 (No. 6-1, Zhenli Street, Tamsui District, Taipei)
Tel: 02-2621 1785

This famous local delicacy dish is steamed with stuffed mince pork, braised crystal noodles and sealed with ﬁsh paste, served with specially blended sweet and sour sauce. I would say that it's more of a acquired taste kind of food, although many people recommends it. For me, it isn't really my taste. But I would say that you should at least try it once to be able to figure out for yourself if you do like it or not.

Here's the various schools in Tamsui that's opening for tourist visits...

This is certainly an interesting sight as I didn't expect to see this within a secondary school.

To cool down from the hot weather, I decided to give the rose ice-cream a try. The shop really know where to place their advertisements to tempt me for the ice-cream. It's pretty nice looking but because the petals are made from raspberry ice cream it's really too sour for my taste buds. I should do better for a strawberry flavored pink flower will definitely suits me more. I love sweet ice-creams :P And if only the ice-cream petals can be placed in such a manner that it won't just keep dripping due to the hot weather, it'll be even better.

Here's a photo of the red castle (红楼). It's really pretty hard to locate, so you really need to look out for the signboards and it's on top of a hill or was that actually another building? Anyway, I think it might look better at night, with the nice looking light and ambiance but in the morning, it doesn't look that crowded and isn't as nice as what it looks on the photos. See the nice looking photo below:

If you are interested, look out for the big red castle signboard along ZhongZhen Road Ave 14 (中正路14巷). It's up the steep staircases at a hidden lane.

We managed to visit the weird museum (搜奇博物馆) and would say that apart from all the weird looking creatures and specimens inside, I noticed that there are quite a number of such museums during my 2nd visit to Taiwan. We didn't visit the 2nd one as it really looks pretty much similar and it's exceptionally crowded on a weekend.

From the look of the queue in this photo, it's like 4 lines worth of queue that we need before we get to the Fishermen's Wharf (渔人码头).

And here's the sunset that after seeing it disappearing above sea level, I decided not to take the boat anymore. Lesson learnt: Visit such tourist attractions on a weekday is much better!