NeYearEve's Count down party

     This is my third New year's day in Taiwan. For the past two years I couldn't make it for the count down party due to reasons. This year I made up my mind strongly to watch that spectacular event. I invited few of my friends. Pola rejected and rest turned up. I didn't anticipate I will be going with 10 people to Taipei. I imagined I will be going with Pola, Srikanth and Raghu if he is willing to join us. It is very hard for us to persuade Rahu to join us in any social gatherings but some  how he showed up. Along with him he brought a localite from Taipei. He is Perry. He helped us all the way. Anyway as the news spread others joined us. I am a bit happy for that.

Gang at HSR

    
     We started at around 6:20 in Hsinchu HSR station. Even though we didn't reserve our tickets we are lucky enough to get seats in the non reserved compartment.

HSR arrived

Inside HSR

  As soon as we arrived Taipei MRT we saw a herd moving towards City hall.

Crowd at Taipei metro

 Now started messing up things. In our group there are many people who are first time visitors to Taipei and few are not fluent with topography. Everybody got down at S.Y. memorial hall station except one guy. So we had to call him to find where he was. Networks were very busy. Finally he told he got down at city hall and was looking for us at city hall exit 2. We walked to city hall exit2 and still couldn't find him in that huge crowd. Somehow after 20mins we find him. After this we went to Nirala Indian store, purchased some Indian snacks and grocery. We had our dinner in some Pakistani restaurant. The restaurant is inside a dinning hall. So it became very difficult to find a place to sit and eat. OMG! may be after 20mins standing beside the people who were eating we could get seats to eat. After we finished dinner we came out and saw the crowd number was increasing. We started to move towards city hall. Suddenly one guy was missing. He is new to city. He neither has a balance in his mobile nor we could  call him due to network problem. I asked others to wait and went in search of him. Finally located him after 10mins and we started to move  again. Meanwhile I received a call from one of my friend stating he was missing. Then once again i went back and got him. We resumed our walk. Mean while I heard one of my friend was speaking over phone and rest were moving away. I waited for  a while but I felt I may miss everyone and I moved to locate the passing group. Once I saw everyone I asked them to wait and came back but these people were not there. This time 3 people were missing. Finally we reached the building at around 11:30 and found a suitable place to sit at around 11:50.

Finally found a place to sit after we start from Hsinchu and they are glad to be the part of count down.

Fire work summary

                          

Music Concert

                      
   Then I managed myself to send sms to missing friends. Finally the countdown began. I couldn't hear huge noise as I imagined. Of course they counted but the noise was not sufficient for me. Once the fireworks started everyone just looked at it spellbound and noise and no disturbance from anyone. Among various fireworks the fire work displaying 100 on air attracted most of the crowd.

     Once This was done everybody started dispersing silently. Ofocurse there were few energetic guys who said hello and happy new year to us here and there in between our journey to Hsinchu. They are curious to ask us from which country we are from.. but couldn't ask i don't know why? While returning we gathered at SY memorial hall station at around 12:20. The announcement in Chinese asked us to walk to Taipei main station or else wait for 30mins. But Raghu decided to stay there which was a bad decision. We stood there for 90mins literally on the same place. It not only wasted time but killed our New year's day. I slept whole day after returning. We finally returned at 6:30am in the morning

   The facilities provided by Taipei government are to be appreciated. They gave a metro round the clock with a frequency of 1metro for every 3mins or something. Even the crowd were very patient enough they didn't caused much trouble to the volunteers who is controlling the crowd and giving instructions. I saw Europeans sitting on the dividers, enjoying their drink and clapping hands and passing New year wishes to everyone.

   Next time if i go i will not return after the event I will just stay there and enjoy the concerts or sit in any garden until the traffic clears.. lol