Sun Moon Lake

This vacation is the first time I'm visiting a country where I don't speak the main language, other than a day in France, where I was close enough to Germany that it barely counted. In Taiwan, I also don't speak the secondary language (Mandarin), so I'm basically asking people to talk in their third language most of the time, which has been pretty interesting.

After meeting up with Chris and his dad (Kevin), we went back to his grandparent's apartment, where we ended up staying the night. Meeting Chris' grandparents was interesting, for the above reasons. They were very hospitable, but I exchanged about 15 words with each of them over the course of the night. I always needed Chris or his dad nearby to help translate.

Then we went out to dinner. I'm not going to try to write the name, because characters. It was a Japanese/Taiwanese place, which was pretty good. Since it was my first meal, I did not exercise any restraint, and ended up eating as much as Chris and Kevin combined. (Since they had already had a big, late lunch.) I forgot to take a picture of the food until after we had eaten part of it, which is becoming a bit of a trend, sadly.

After dinner we wandered around the neighborhood in New Taipei a bit, where I picked up a fifth of Ballantine's Whisky, and also a single-serve bottle of Taiwan Beer's Weissbeer, which is sadly a Taipei exclusive. The neighborhood looked really cool, and I wish I had taken some more pictures while walking around.

We then went back to the apartment, and I watched TV where I understood neither of the languages being spoken. Though the game show Hidden Singer was pretty self-explanatory. We also flipped past CNN and The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift. I recognized the latter in about two lines of dialogue, which I'm not sure whether to be proud of.

The next morning I woke up way too early, sleeping from 10-5. I typed yesterday's blog post on my phone, and then we went out to get breakfast from a street vendor. We walked past a bunch of people, mostly older, doing some exercises in a park, and got breakfast at a small, open-air cafe. We just picked up breakfast, and ate back at the apartment, where Chris' grandparents had just woken up.

We then went into Taipei (from New Taipei) to start our 5 day, 4 night tour of Taiwan. There were a ton of mopeds in the morning traffic.

We drank some coffee in the hotel lobby and met Daniel, our tour guide. At this point Kevin left me and Chris, and our bus pulled out. I was excited to see my first rice paddy as we left the city, a sight which went from exciting to commonplace remarkably quickly. The first day of our tour focused on the area around Sun Moon Lake, a mountain lake in Taiwan. The first thing we did was check out a market in the area, where I had some chicken stuffed with rice, along with a couple of other small things. I was still full from last night at this point.

We went to both a Buddhist and Daoist temple in the area, and I climbed the ~600 steps to the Ci-en (Tse-En? Don't get me started on how confusing and inconsistent romanizing Taiwanese is...) Pagoda. I took a couple of pictures from the top, but our tour was somewhat rushed at that point, so I turned around before I caught my breath. In the Buddhist temple, we weren't allowed to take pictures, and in the Daoist temple, I forgot my phone on the bus. (Chris has pictures.) The group below is me breathlessly taking pictures from the Pagoda. It's a shame the day was misty, since there were a ton of cool mountains barely visible in the background.

We then arrived at the Fleur de Chine, a nice hotel where we stayed our first night, we got a nice, Japanese-style room with a toilet I barely knew how to control. And a heated seat, which is a great idea. The bathroom has a sunken-in tub, where me and Chris each enjoyed soaking away.

And the balcony had a cool view, where we started on the Ballantine's. We didn't make it too far before dinner, since we were both pretty beat from our short night.

For dinner we had a Western buffet. It was interesting to see the Taiwanese take on Western, which was not at all what I was expecting. It was at dinner that I first came across an unlimited source of drinking water, so I stopped being dehydrated for basically the first time since landing. After dinner me and Chris basically just crashed, and we slept from 10-6, which was apparently the perfect time to see the sun come over the hill.

Note to self: More pictures of the outside of buildings.