A Quick One While She's Away

One more post before bed.  The very last picture that we took in Taiwan is worth sharing.  Early on in our trip; we were told that you know you've mastered chopsticks when you can eat rice one grain at a time.  Please feel free to congratulate Master Maura in the comments section.

Live From Tokyo

Hi everyone,

This is just a quick check-in to say that we have left Taiwan for good.  We landed safely in Tokyo, where we will be for the next four nights, and one of the three full days will be spent in Kyoto.  This is the vacation part of our summer, since we were working for nearly the whole time we were in Taiwan, as awesome of an experience as it was, of course.  Also, the exhaustion that comes with corralling kindergarteners (Maura wouldn't like that job description, but I adore alliteration) left us completely incapable of sending all of the Taiwan posts that we wanted to write, so expect more Taiwan posts for the next few days (who am I kidding...weeks or months is more accurate) mixed in with the Japan ones.  That's all for now since we are going to jam-pack the next three days full of as much stuff as possible (don't worry all you smell-the-roses people out there - most of the places we're jam-packing in are temples and gardens where we will take our time to enjoy everything).

Sayonara,
Tom

Potty Talk

So we've been blogging for a couple of months now, and some of you have been very kind and have been reading our ramblings from across the world.  I imagine, however, that one thought has been running rampant through your minds for weeks now: what are the bathrooms like?  Calm down for a minute, and I'll tell you all about them.  First of all, our bathroom here is very much like a bathroom you'd find in an apartment at home; shower with a tub, sink with a mirror, toilet you can sit on, and not much more.  Many of the public bathrooms, however, have only one of those things, and it's not the toilet (or the shower, but you already knew that).  At least, not like Western toilets.  You see, these toilets are built into the ground, the idea being that you squat over it and do your business without ever actually touching the bowl.  As weird and gross as it sounds, I've actually read about health benefits to that style of toilet, but we don't need to talk about the efficacy of different methods of waste disposal, do we?  Good.  Here's a picture of a typical bathroom.

Okay, I lied.  This is actually a toilet in one of the nicer restaurants we've been in, so it's probably nicer than might be typical.

Now, you're probably thinking, "Well, that's all well and good, but what do you do with the toilet paper?"  I'm glad that you asked, because that is the most unfortunate thing about using the toilet in Taiwan.  Their plumbing is typically not of the highest quality, and most toilets (really all of the ones we've seen outside of the airport) can't flush toilet paper.  That waste basket that is suspiciously close to the toilet is actually where you put the used toilet paper.  Like I said, it's quite unfortunate.  It's one of the very few things that I never quite got used to doing.  Okay, that's another lie; I totally got used to it, but I kind of wish I hadn't.  I have to remember to completely remove the waste basket from our bathrooms at home to avoid any relapses.

Finally, I'll address the burning question that our male readers have been dying to ask for the totally excessive amount of time that it's taken to read this disgusting post: "Do they have any helpful reminders posted behind the urinals so that I don't embarrass myself, and are they translated to English so that I can benefit from them?"  I'm happy to report that the answer is a resounding, "YES!"  I'll leave you with three of the most helpful urinals that I've encountered in Taiwan.

We have not had betel nuts on this trip, but we've seen many betel nut stands on the sides of roads.  They are often marked by seizure-inducing, multicolored lights and life size pictures of attractive women, and the similarly attractive women that sell them always can be seen sitting in the big window in front of each hut.  From the various descriptions people have given us of what they do, I would guess that they are somewhere between coffee and cocaine.

I found this particularly helpful, as I have a tendency to get complacent with repetitive activities.

If you can't read this one, it says, "Would you stand closer.  Please."
Very direct, although it does force the user to ultimately disobey its simple order, lest they wind up inside the urinal, at which point they have probably caused the very problem the warning was meant to avoid.  Still, I appreciated the politeness.

Sun Moon Lake Continued

So by the end of our late-night tea-and-cards foray, the Sun Moon Lake trip had grown to include everyone that was at tea, plus Jenny, one of Eric's friends, and his 4 year old son.  Eric and his friend drove us to Sun Moon Lake, which took a little under two hours.  We got some great initial views of the lake from the road, but then we had a lot of trouble finding a parking spot before being stopped by a woman that was following us through the parking lot on her moped.  She told us that we could park in a nearby lot if we bought tickets to tour the lake on her company's boats.  Mind you, this was all in Chinese, but we got the gist of it between context and Fran's translating.  The boat tickets were sort of a hop-on-hop-off deal with three stops, one being the start and end of the trip.  The lake itself was beautiful.  It was pretty clear at first, and we could just make out distant mountains past the ones that immediately surround the lake.  As the day went on, those mountains disappeared into the clouds, eventually followed by even the nearby mountains before we left.  The water was greenish-blue, and there were lots of boats, mostly medium sized ferries, moving in every direction on it.  See for yourself:

Those characters represent Sun Moon Lake.  The Chinese characters, not the people characters.  Those are Maura and Tom.

Those distant mountains looked really big, and then they were gone for the rest of the day.

Having never been to Hawaii, I've decided that this was pretty much the same exact experience.  The only way to convince me otherwise is to buy us plane tickets.  I dare you.

From left: Fran, Joy, Maura, and Jenny.

This town was our next stop.

The mountains really were pretty majestic.  You can see the town in the bottom right corner.

At the second stop, we wandered through a few shops and ate dinner at a nice little restaurant.  We had noodles or rice, which were good, and a few shared side dishes.  One of those was a wild boar dish, and it was definitely one of my favorite foods that I've tried in Taiwan.  Really delicious.  Here's a few pictures from town:

Don't let your eyes deceive you: I'm reasonably sure that this woman was not the devil.  She actually seemed quite nice, no matter what those crispy birds said.

I almost forgot to take a picture of the boar.  This was all that was left when I remembered, mainly because I had eaten most of it.

This was a shop specializing in nougat, which is a pretty big product over here.  They all seemed to have nuts in them, so I sat this one out, but Maura tried some.  She said it was fine, but not something that she would eat too often.

Our last stop had several hiking paths, some of which led to a temple.  Stereotype alert: Taiwanese people generally don't seem to like walking long distances in the heat.  They tend to find it fairly shocking that Maura and I have occasionally walked to places over a mile away instead of taking a cab or stealing a car (maybe not stealing).  They didn't want to hike, but we still climbed up the steps to a smaller temple with some great views.  Also, the crowds were ridiculous, mainly with tourist groups from mainland China.  Here are those pictures:

The entrance to the area from the pier.

One of the better living statues that we've seen.

Sun Moon Lake behind us.

There was a long line of people waiting to take their picture next to that rock behind us.  Tour groups are the worst.

That's Joy and Eric's son playing in a ... thing that was there.

Like I said, there were BIG crowds at this particular place.

From there, we took the boat back to the starting pier, hung out for a bit, and then headed back to Taichung.  Here's one last picture of Sun Moon Lake:

Compare this to the first photos and you can see how much the clouds had crept in while we were there.

I slept off and on for the whole ride home, because I am completely incapable of staying awake here if I'm not moving or talking to someone.  That's all for our last weekend in Taichung.  Thanks for reading!

Science, Parks, & Sun Moon Lake

So we had a very, very busy last weekend in Taiwan.  The last weekend had been left open from the start (the only weekend for which we didn't have plans arranged by the school), so we decided to use it to enjoy a few things that we hadn't gotten to do yet.  After tossing around a few places that I'm sure would have been amazing but also would have been very hard to get to and cost a small fortune, the answer was practically decided for us.  The family that was going to take us to Sun Moon Lake, a very mountain lake and resort area, had to cancel last weekend, so we decided to go there for a day.  When we told Jenny, another teacher, about our plan, she decided to come, too.  Then, some other conversations happened that we didn't exactly know about.  Anyways, long story short, we ended up taking two cars, eight adults, and one 4 year old.  I'm getting ahead of myself, though.  The trip to Sun Moon Lake was on Sunday.  Since that had become more of a group trip, Maura and I decided to spend Saturday alone in Taichung.  We went to the National Science Museum several weeks ago, and were a bit underwhelmed with what we saw.  It was more for kids, and there was very little English.  We also didn't leave ourselves enough time for the exhibit halls, however, which was a separate admission.  We decided to go to those exhibit halls on Friday, followed by a bus ride to Taichung Park in the evening.  The exhibit halls were pretty great, especially the large section of dinosaur fossils/animatronic dinosaur robots.  Don't take my word for it; here are some pictures:

This was in the entrance to the museum.

There were three sauropod (I think) skeletons in a circular courtyard in the middle of the museum.

See?

This is a giant squid.  Maura was not impressed.

This was from a section on Chinese innovation.  This device is actually an ancient seismograph.  The information was all in Chinese, but the best we could understand is that those dragons all have little marbles in their mouths, and movement in the Earth causes them to fall into the frogs below, indicating the direction of the movement.  We could be way off on that.

There was a section on Chinese medicine, including this outdoor herb garden.

I'm pretty sure that this T-Rex was sneezing on the velociraptor in front of it.

Woops.  I meant that the T-Rex was awesomely attacking the velociraptor...not sneezing.  Sorry, Mr. T-Rex.

This museum appears to have kept up with the times well.

This canoe is from an exhibit on the aboriginal people of Taiwan.

Maura fearlessly inserted herself into the middle of a fearsome fossil fight for a fantastic photo op.

One of the special exhibits at the museum contained a bunch of oversized duplicates of famous artworks and let you pose as part of them.  I don't know why it was in the museum of science, but we had some fun with it.

Maura invented sunglasses.

I'm hoping a talent agent sees this photo and realizes my comedic potential.

After the museum, we went to a restaurant called Ponderosa, and we ate at their buffet.  It's apparently an American chain steakhouse, but I had never heard of it before coming here.  The food was definitely not the highest quality, but they had fruits, vegetables and iced tea, so we filled up on those.  When we finished, we got on the bus headed to Taichung Park.  It was pretty dark by the time we got there, and my camera battery was just about dead.  The park was really nice, consisting of a small pond, several bridges, and the Lake Heart Pavilion, which Taichung has adopted as it's city logo (weird wording for that?).  There was also a hill in back with a few buildings on it, and a HUGE statue of three goats - owing to the total randomness and crazy size of said statue, along with the fact that my camera died as I tried to take a picture of it, I'm not ruling out that Maura and I shared a hallucination, possibly as a result of the "popcorn chicken" at Ponderosa.  Here are the pictures that I was able to take at the park:

There were other pictures of Maura on this bridge, but every darn one of them came out blurry.  This one is much darker than them, but at least you can see Maura in it.

This was taken from the Lake Heart Pavilion, which is built in the middle of the pond.

Also from the park.

We got on the bus and headed back to the school, finishing our very full day at 8:30.  We were getting up early for Sun Moon Lake in the morning, so we figured that going to bed early was a pretty good idea.  Just as we got back to the school, though, the phone that the school gave me for emergencies rang.  It was a teacher named Emmett, asking me if we wanted to play (play is a weirdly translated word; people also asked us what we played in Hong Kong).  We figured, "Why not?", and got ready to go out to who knows where.  I was ready for a basketball game or video games, but it turns out that the father of one of the kids at school was around and wanted to hang out, so we went and did that at a tea restaurant with him, Emmett, Joy, and another teacher named Fran.  We had tea, appetizers, and played some card games.  Maura even hurt her finger stabbing the father while playing a game that resembled Slap Jack.  We had fun, although we stayed out really late and didn't get to bed (we still hadn't showered from our day of walking a few miles in 95 degree humidity) until 2:00 am.  That's it for Saturday, and I'll continue Sunday and Sun Moon Lake in a second post.

Oops, I almost forgot...before the tea restaurant, we went to a nice, new park called the Maple Garden.  Here are a couple of pictures from the Maple Garden.

The park was this winding walkway around a man-made pond at the bottom of a dug-out valley in the middle of the city.

This is in a very nice part of the city, so the buildings surrounding the park are all new, colorful, and clean-looking.

There was really no wind to speak of, which was unfortunate with the heat, but made for some nice reflective pictures.

This came out blurry, but from left to right: Me, Maura, Joy, Fran, Eric (the father), and Emmett.