Friday, 11 February 2011.

TAIWAN.

so. much. epic.

The night markets were awesome. Taiwanese food! SNOW ICE. Fruit-flavoured milk and tea and awesomeness. barbecue chicken, youtiao, caramelised sweet potato. the non-night-market food was awesomeness too--- we had a different kind every night!

-taiwanese sweets

-giant custard apple

-bag of popcorn

-pepper dried fish

-bucket of strawberries

-box of mochi

-wang wang crackers (okay, so not that uniquely Taiwanese, but we got a HUGE pack for like the equivalent of sixty cents)

the first day was kind of fun but kind of pointless-- airplane trip was just undiluted hilarity. we saw a park with TONS AND TONS of dogs, and then later went to a museum where the lighting was so bad i had to just sit down and stone while everyone else sightsaw. first hotel was nice, although there was some rooming-awkwardness, as there so often is.

second day! chiang kai-shek memorial hall. pretty painted lanterns. stalkery photos of the insides of random people's cars! Long long long bus ride inside of bright red tour bus. many many many rest stops-- MOCHI MUSEUM WIN WIN WIN. free samples, too. taiwan's longest tunnel. pretty sure that was the day we bought mochi. MOCHI PARTAY. bought clothing for self + christabella while wandering around the streets of wherever we actually were. (....oops, forgot where we actually were. =/)

THIRD DAY. taroko national park looked like something that came out of the inside of a seashell. hearts. cliffs. epically lovely but made katie have panic attacks. many tunnels. rest stops at Guanyin shrine, Tropic of Cancer Monument, and Three Immortals, which was a pretty beach covered in round stones where Katie attempted to jump across something and tripped and fell into someone. we adopted a piece of driftwood before finding out later we weren't supposed to... oh well. here we are, Peffy Flaffy Limenfrank. (awesome driftwood names for the forever win!) That night I think we were intending to have a dried-fish party BUT LEFT THE DRIED FISH IN THE TOUR BUS. hotel was an adorable resort in the middle of nowhere that organised Disastrous Activities. the one where people were told to act sexy was particularly eyebrow-raising. and then the one where this guy on our trip dropped his trousers. MOVING ON. we had these lanterns that we would write wishes on and light up and they would go into the sky and fly away. my group's one went up high enough just to be a teeny orange light before GOING OUT and FALLING OUT OF THE SKY. so we all ran after it to see where it would land. luckily in some sort of deserted grassy hollow. then somebody poked it and it caught fire again and flew up after us while burning and we shrieked and ran away. (high schoolers, very courageous, yes?) but all it did was turn into a cloud of black dust. OUR WISHES BROKE THE LANTERN. our wishes went down in flames!! although, to be fair, most people didn't write wishes; they drew things like hamburgers and phallic rocket ships. no wonder the lantern didn't make it.

that evening i was emo.

fourth day! strawberry cornflakes + chicken nuggets for breakfast. bus trip to kaohsiung. roadside fruit stand!! i didn't even like custard-apple before stopping there, but afterwards... well. MANY HEARTS. i bought a huuuuge custard apple and a large orange. strawberry smoothie courtesy of Melinda! kaohsiung's old British Consulate was in red-brick and oh-so-pretty and we saw a lot of Falun Gong practitioners who just happened to be there. we took a ferry to this island and rode motorised bicycles around. without like any training or practice at all. SO MUCH PANIC. we were driving along the side of this road in single file in these peculiar two-person hybrids between bicycles and golf-carts while navigating pedestrians, bicycles, cars and motor scooters going every which way.... fun, but utterly terrifying, especially when one suddenly forgets how to brake. katie and melinda had a close encounter of the painful kind with a car. its entire muffler came off and katie's knee got screwed and six people came out to yell at her and this person on our trip tried to do the obnoxious, malicious, generally awful thing of saying she'd done it on purpose and from all accounts it was awful. i wouldn't know, since i was kind of stranded at the park along with everyone who'd been in front of them in our single file. NEWSFLASH TO PEOPLE. IF YOU TRY TO BLAME UNRELATED THINGS ON A PERSON'S ILLNESS, DISABILITY OR DISORDER, YOU ARE BEING OFFENSIVE. anyway they caught up with us eventually and katie needed several hugs and we slid down this random rainbow sculpture several times and i screwed up my knee. then some of the bikes were broken so after riding back to the bike place we had to go back sans passengers to pick up the other people... by that point it was dark out and we were joyriding down the roads rather recklessly. epic fun, but i wouldn't necessarily do it again. i don't even know whether i damaged anything. =/ SO AFTER THAT WE WENT TO THE NIGHT MARKET AND IT WAS EPIC EPIC FUN AND REALLY REALLY AWESOME and i ate barbecue chicken and youtiao and strawberry milk and strawberry snow ice and caramelised sweet potato and no matter how much it cost it was worth it. then we went back to the hotel and i ended up hacking the skin off the custard apple with a tiny plastic coffee stirrer and it was delicious.

fifth day!! SUN MOON LAKE. research presentation! before sun moon lake, the Big Red Bus took us to a coffee place where we picked up a big bag of popcorn and i had a caramel milk tea. AWESOMENESS, i tell you. then, bizarrely, a wine place where we were strictly forbidden from having anything alcoholic. we did have icecream sandwiches! PEACH FLAVOUR. boat ride at Sun Moon Lake was superb. we saw Lalu Island and it was tinyyyyyy and adorable. then we stopped at a temple on the other side of the lake and katie picked up a pamphlet on Buddhism and then it had a thing on the back telling us we had to treat it with respect and we discussed its merits for a while before trying to translate the Falun Gong pamphet we'd somehow picked up on the way back through the lake. and then another NIGHT MARKET. huge corn dogs, a game machine full of Grass Mud Horses, a racist tea vendor we accidentally bought from before noticing the large sign on his shop saying GO AWAY KOREANS, these phallic-shaped cakes being sold under the tagline A Piece of Gayke.... O____________O

sometime that day we also stopped by a large monastery with a temple with many huge and amazing statues and a lovely garden.

and then we ended up in the nicest hotel of the whole entire trip where we just sort of listened to Melinda's music and ate popcorn. the rooms had those fancy japanese toilets!! haha so random. we drew pictures in the condensation on the windows.

sixth day! the first day when i didn't hear the morning call and had to get woken up by someone else who did. breakfast was lovely and sociable for once. we went strawberry-picking but since the strawberries had pesticide we had to take them back to the hotel first and wash them a lot. Katie got high on betel nut and took funny pictures. we went to the ximending area and i got awesome awesome food and i bought souvenirs for everyone. we shared a peach snow ice, which was really delicious-- its slight lack of peachiness was more than made up for by the added tinned peaches. we stopped by the Martyrs' Shrine and watched the changing of the guard, and katie fell asleep on a bench without us noticing. Dinner was absolutely incredible-- we went to this tiny place selling Japanese-style Western food in a very Japanese-style Western manner. (White and red everywhere, frills, wicker, baked rice, tons upon tons of cake..) It was an order-all-you-can-eat type of place and our table ate SO MUCH. Maybe eight platters of food and definitely nine pieces of cake between the three of us. All of it except the vegetable spaghetti was delicious; the vegetable spaghetti simply tasted very strongly of vegetable. if i'd eaten any more of it at all i would most certainly have been very ill, but looking back i find myself wishing i'd eaten more just because of its awesomeness. then we went back to the hotel we stayed in the very first night, somehow having made our way back to Taipei. went to 7-11, freeloaded shamelessly off Katie, ate a muchness of crackers and some strawberries, and crashed in Katie and Melinda's hotel room rather than going back to the room i shared with Summitt where i actually had an actual bed.

LAST DAY. we went to Taipei 101, which was rather a disappointment because even though the lift was fun, the 89th storey was just a tourist-trap-style collection of overpriced shops and the observation deck only had a tiny corner open to the public. even the binoculars were coin-operated. then we ate at Din Tai Fung and what can i even say? it was so, so, so, so, so, so good. SO GOOD.

then we went to the airport and i picked up more souvenirs and stressed out about being late for our flight, so we went through departure immigration-is that what it's called?- and i stressed out some more due to not actually being used to travelling while only carrying a small black bag + shopping. and then we got on the airplane and CAME BACK HERE. yay.

i told my mother i was blogging and she said it was good and would develop my writing skills. i feel kind of really guilty because nothing i have actually written is remotely close to anything that would even require writing skills.

ri-chan and i have MATCHING BEST-FRIEND T-SHIRTS NOW. BE VERY VERY AFRAID.

also i got her a creepy fashion doll that is very adorable and we have named her Tanya.

no, whatever doesn't cover it this time, you liar.

{ 11:03 pm }