Day Trip - International Flora Expo

See the Int'l Flora Expo official website here

Tons of amazing flowers! Especially orchids.

You can take the MRT from pretty much any line and get a shuttle directly to the expo. Just look at some MRT maps during expo season and you're bound to see the expo logo.

So I think the Taipei International Flora Exposition (TIFE) is a yearly thing, but I'm not sure because this year it's from like November to May I think and that's a long time if it is a yearly thing. Tickets are pretty cheap. A whole day ticket is only $300 NTD. You can come later in the day and get cheaper rates. After 2:00pm I think it's only $200 and after 6:00pm it's only $150. See the pricing schedule:

You can also pay with your Easy Pass MRT card if you have one. We paid in cash, so I don't know if the Easy Card gets you a discount. 

These two guys were near the entrance of the expo.

This was just kinda cool because it was pretty amazing orchid work, but it wasn't event really a display. It's just a place for people to sit down near the entrance. 

The expo was actually really big:

This one is a picture of a Starbucks right in the middle of the whole expo. Taiwan is unashamedly capitalist. 

Some art thing. I don't know what it's supposed to be. 

The mazes were cool. This one is the tot maze. Some kids were too small to see over the hedges. Kids went crazy in these things.  

Megan got us thoroughly lost in the maze. 

It seems like a bunch of different mazes when you're in it, but it actually is one massive maze and you're supposed to enter on one of those colored dots and exit on the other if you wanna play the challenge. 

Workers are clearly marked. 

Display of flowers. The whole expo was really huge. Maybe the size of Disneyland. I didn't take many panoramic pictures because there weren't really any good vantage points. But you can basically imagine the entirety of Disneyland covered in the above pictures.

There were a lot of country displays in one section of the expo. Pictured above are two pictures of Holland, and one each of Indonesia, Greece, and Thailand. 

The Korean display. Of course, kim-chi pots!

The American exhibit was log-cabinesque and there were cowboy hats so people could readily look ridiculous. The rest of the American exhibit seemed really commercialized, saying stuff like: Buy our potatoes! Buy our beef! Buy our cotton!

         

The Japan exhibit seemed to be the most popular country exhibit, judging by the line.  

One of the cooler artsy-type buildings. 

I love those mini-landscape scenes. 

There was a lot of stuff that we didn't see because the expo was just too huge and we were getting tired. Since it'll be running so long, we'll probably go back in a couple of months. 

'Til the next post!