2013 Taiwan Trip Day 6 Part 2 (Taipei 101)

Hooray for Taipei 101!!! The view from the top is already something I’m tired of (as I have already climbed up both the Empire State building in New York and the Eiffel Tower), but the interior of the building is really pretty. Moreover, I really love that I got to see the mass damper! It is just so majestic when it’s already in front of you!

This is a photo from directly below the building. I was fresh out of the MRT when I took this photo… and on the ground floor is an outlet of Din Tai Fung as well. This outlet has a crazy following because there were still about 50 people in line even at 10:30 in the evening!!!

The first six floors of Taipei 101, if I counted correctly, are mall space floors. It’s a mall full of all sorts of designer brand apparel and gourmet restaurants and cafes…

And time flies so fast! They’re already celebrating their 10th birthday very soon!

I cannot explain how weird it feels to me that their Louis Vuitton store has open doors and no lines whatsoever. Most of the designer goods stores in Hong Kong are closed door ones, and often you will see extremely rich women falling in line outside, waiting in the cold as staff observe strict occupant limits inside the store. I think they do it because they want to keep the stores posh and calm shopping areas, not some kind of market… It’s one of life’s funniest ironies when you see store personnel stop super rich women from shopping inside their store…

Or maybe this outlet just happens to be big enough that it need not observe occupant rules?

Not sure if LV’s creative director had already planned out that ducks will be part of this time’s display, or that they are just joining in the rubber duckie fever in their sophisticated way…

Love the display of this French dessert shop…

And look at all those pretty macarons!!! <3

They have a big De Beers jewelry store as well as a giant Tiffany and Co. store…

This is the ticket booth… I read somewhere that it cost USD 1.76B to build Taipei 101 so they really need to charge quite a high price for entrance…

Even in the waiting area they already have a lot of souvenirs on display to entice you in your time of boredom hahaha

At the 89th floor this is how it basically looks like… the 91st floor observatory was closed during our visit because of bad weather…

And look at this cute Christmas tree made of a stack of Taipei 101 shaped glass bottles! Cutie!!!

And these are photos of the stuff in the souvenir shop in the 89th floor…

This is just the cutest part about 101, that they made a profile for the Damper babies! They were able to make cute and saleable mascots from a ball that was originally installed to protect the building from suffering the forces and energies imposed by earthquakes and strong typhoons…

In here they have actual footage of how the ball was shaking during a strong typhoon that hit Taiwan mid-2013…

There’s a wish tree, and this one wish was just so funny I had to take a photo of it.

And these are more items from the souvenir shop… everything in this store is so expensive that the items are really just for viewing and photo-taking purposes… many items are so unreasonably priced…

On the 88th floor, there’s this whole strip of jade and coral counters, and the pieces cost houses. The coral sculptures cost from 500,000 NT to 20,000,000 NT…