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Published: March 5th 2011
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Golden Cat of Fortune
Pat, Charlotte, Sam, Mark and I I headed out for Spring Festival vacation on January 7th. My Chinese New Year vacation was 45 days long and I planned to go to Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. The first stop was Taiwan.
I met an interesting Canadian from Vancouver in the Nanjing Airport before we took off to Taipei. He sells racquet sports equipment, but mostly badminton equipment, all over the world. A good portion of his market happens to be Asian consumers and a lot of his factories are just outside of Nanjing. When our plane touched down in Taipei, he and his friend gave me a lift into town. He was a really nice guy. We talked about Badminton, the outdoors, Chinese economics and development, and the Cascades.
After wandering around some alleyways trying to find the Chocolate Box Backpacker’s Hostel for about 20 minutes, a kind Taiwanese man approached me and offered to help. He let me use his phone and helped me to find the hostel within a few minutes. So far the people here were great!
I met Mark Maples, Charlotte Linton (a fellow teacher at An Gong Da), Pat Owens and Sam Fielding (friends from UPS)
Hot Springs
The top level was 49 C, mid-level was 42 C and the bottom level was 38 C. at the hostel in Taipei. Mark and Sam are on Fublright teaching assistant scholarships in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Pat’s been teaching in Seoul, South Korea for the last year and a half.
We started off going to the Shida night market and wandered around for a while. Got some pretty incredible street food, pizza in a cup smothered in spaghetti, Luwei and jiao zi. Afterwards, we met up with a friend of Mark’s who was really welcoming and well versed in Chinese poetry. He’s on a fullbright for researching Chinese Poetry in Taipei.
The next morning we woke up to go to some hot springs after some more street food. I had one particular xiao bing and it was so great, I had another. It was a fried flour wrap with lettuce, apples, sprouts, tomatoe, and some strange kind of sauce.
The hot springs we went to were legit. They had leveling degrees of heat in leveled pools amongst the hillside. 36 C, 42 C, and 49 C, with two cold pools. It was HOT! Common practice is to shower with freakishly cold water and to wash off your feet with the sulfur water before entering the springs.
UPS Alums unite
mark, sam, me, pat The hot springs made your skin temporarily red after you exited. I had a hard time staying in the 42 C pool and every single Taiwanese person outlasted me. Some of them hadn’t even left in the 4 times I got in and out. I think they could probably touch lava.
Afterwards, we headed out to Dan shui where Taipei meets the ocean and walked around a carnival style night market area. It’s a really pretty view and we caught it just as the sun was going down. We ate some dumplings, French fries, and Turkish ice cream… wait… Where am I again? Oh that’s right… Taiwan - they’ve definitely accepted a lot of Western ideas, food, and culture, but maintained their own too. We then just chilled out on a dock, drank some beer (yeah that’s right, you can drink in public – as long as you’re not an idiot about it) and people watched for a while.
Next morning we took of for Mao Kong. It’s a mountainous jungle filled place with a zillion teahouses overlooking from the hill. Most of the hills were growing oolong tealeaves, which is the kind of tea Taiwan is known
for. We went to a teahouse with two of Mark’s friends and just chilled out for the afternoon. I absolutely pwned Charlotte, Pat and Sam at a game of Hearts and then we went to a tent full of street venders selling stinky tofu, corn dogs, fried noodles, egg pancakes, and sweet sausages on a stick with raw garlic. Cho Dofu (or stinky tofu) is quite the acquired taste (that I don’t believe I’ll ever acquire). The smell is like taking dirty socks that had been worn through a marathon and then frying it. I’ll admit the taste is actually not bad, but I just can’t stand the lingering smell as your eating it.
Later that night we ate some hot pot with Mark’s friends near the hostel. It was a nice temporary farewell dinner (because we’d be seeing mark and sam the next weekend) in Taipei, but I don’t like eating not-spicy hotpot.
Sam and Mark took off to head back to Kaohsiung and we met a English/American couple looking for teaching jobs in Taipei at our hostel. We headed out with them and went to a Belgian beer bar. We talked about plans to go to
Taroko Gorge and they sounded interested so we invited them along. We initially planned to rent scooters in Taipei and just floor it down to Taroko Gorge which would have been EPIC, but ended up taking a train off to the nearby town of Hualian.
To be continued…
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looking forward to the rest
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