Taiwan -- NickTaninJapan

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Date Posted: 19:11:13 08/22/01 Wed
Author: Nick
Subject: Taiwan

I arrived on June 22, 2001! My friends picked me up from the chiang-kai-shek international airport! I stayed with a friend of mine.

I have a great bunch ofbuddies there and they took me around in their cars and scooters. I even got to ride a scooter around town! (Did you know that there are 2 scooters for every person in Taiwan? It's really wicked to ride around in a scooter, park anywhere you want, race off in a pack with lots of other scooters feeling the wind in your face, negotiating tight sidewalks! Definitely an experience I can't forget!) And my friends really took time off their work schedule just to take me out! really nice friends huh?

Anyhow, we went to sun-yat-sen and chiang kai-shek's memorial halls. The Taiwan National Hall guards are just incredible. They stand motionless for 30 minutes at a time. so guy has to clean off their sweat for them even. They have this elaborate `changing of the guards.' And they are in perfect synchrony. There were no second sounds when they stomped their gun barrels and boots onto their shiny metal box stand! They also can't walk backwards, so they have to do this turn-turn-turn thing to turn around! Really really cool!

A good group of 20 of us then went up a hill/mountain that night and boiled/drank tea in a nice little patio in the midst of tress on a mountain looking out at the Taipei night lights, just chatting away and playing mahjong, cards, and stuff. It was really fun.

I also went to the scenic northeast coastline of Taiwan. It really looked a lot better in the airport brochures than it was! Nevertheless, we enjoyed ourselves and we also went to this national stone park where stones of many shapes (queen's head, crabs, honeycombs, beehives, you name it) stick out the ground like lollipops! very strange. very peculiar. And It was really neat.
we played lots of mahjong when I was there as well. I lost some and won some.
I went to Hsi Men Ding, the young hang out district. Prostitution is high there too. young high school girls stick their numbers of post-it notes on your scooter and you can call them to arrange for some ....

I couldn't miss the Taiwan National Museum (I had such a blast the last time I was there). It was great this time too. By far, the best museum for chinese pieces. They have so much stuff and in such well-preserved quality! Their stuff from the pre-Shang dynasty around 5000 B.C. is still in perfect condition and there are lots of them! In fact, they have so much stuff, that they still have crates stored safely in the mountain (the museum is built at the foot of yangmingshan mountain) that they brought over from the civil war and still haven't open them yet (they don't even know what's in there except that it is genuine and valueable)! They say that they could rotate the pieces in the museum every month for 100 years and they still would not be able to display them all! I would just love to be curator at that museum!

I also went to a hotsprings on yangmingshan mountain (a famous mountain in taiwan) with a really cute girl I knew from before. we also went up the mountain of course.

Jonathan Tseng(my friend from highschool and now studying medicine in Taipei) and I went to this romantic area by the river with patios, outdoor eateries and stuff.

oh, I also played basketball with my friends there. It's been a long while since I have played ball with them.

I also had spicy steamboat (ma-lah-huo-guo) there. It was really tasty. I also tried a tonne of stuff like egg biscuit (tan-bing), duck tongues, chicken hearts, chicken liver, shark meat, cuttlefish soup, takoyaki, oyster omelete, lots of different kinds of noodles, ice shavings, ai yue bing, opium balls (not literally; I know what you are thinking!), mongolian BBQ, deep friend squid eyeballs which tasted great!, many different kinds of fruits. Oh I just ate everything I did not recognize!

Hong Kong was great for eating too! I ate lots of fishball noodle soup (fishballs and the noodles + soup taste so much better there!), lots of porridge, lots of on the street stuff, dim sum of course. Heck I just stuffed myself daily!

I left Taiwan for Japan on June 29, 2001. boy, was I sad...... I didn't know when I will get to see my best friends again.... And it was the end of my travelling/vacation so to speak, cuz I was going to Japan to work!

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Replies:

Re: Taiwan -- big D, 19:25:07 09/05/01 Wed