I'm almost done travelling in Taiwan.

I know that's kind of a weird thing to say. Can you ever really be "done" travelling somewhere? Unless it's you've been to every city and seen every sight, there's always more to do. But minus me finding any new things to spark my interest, I only have two places on the island I want to see. And who knows, I may knock those out in a week or so.

My trip today was up the north coast of the island, wrapping around to Keelung, or by it's correct pinyin name, Jilong. Get your shit together and decide on a consistent romanization method, Taiwan. Really I just wanted to go to the northernmost point of the island and say "Yup... north and south, done it." But I found a few surprises on the way.

Definitely not a tourist area

I started my trip by going up to Tanshui, the northern most point on the MRT. While there I was looking for a bus that would take me to that point, and happened along a tourist bus going along the north coast. It was $100 and I could hop on and off at any time for the day. That sounded great to me, so off I went. They gave me a pamphlet detailing what I could see at each stop, and honestly 99% looked like crap. But a few things did look interesting.

The one I was actually going for, the extremely not well documented northernmost point in Taiwan. They didn't stop there, so I got off at the nearest stop - about half a mile away. Armed with Google Maps I started walking through areas I doubt many tourists have been to, passing through a light industry, harbor like area. There were many glances at the strange foreigner who is clearly lost. I continued on through a village, before finding a field. At the other end of this field I could see a path. Unfortunately this field was also used for horses, or cows, or something because it was muddy and covered in manure. But shoes be damned, I went through, and it turned into an immaculately maintained path to a lighthouse. It was locked unfortunately. It's quite pretty there, they should turn it into a proper destination.

Hi!

The other POI was Yeliou Geopark. What is a geopark? Apparently it's a place where you look at rocks. It was $50 to get in, but standing on the wharf I could see the entire park pretty clearly. It was a trail along the beach to a base of a mountain, that you couldn't actually climb. I thought this was dumb. Their rocks were not that pretty. So I didn't go. But they did have a tourist tra... err, shopping mall which had a small aquarium underneath. Walking around I passed by a stairwell and heard music, which sounded very familiar. I checked my phone to see if it started playing on its own, but it was not. I went up the stairway, and as the music got clearer, I was right - it was the battle theme to Final Fantasy XIII. Really. And I just downloaded that song last night. I turn the corner, and I see a dolphin show synchronized to that music, perhaps the oddest choice ever for a dolphin show. Try to imagine the picture on the right set to this:

This move costs 10 MP

So, that's weird. Not really dolphin music. But hey, leave it playing. Maybe it will make reading this blog epic.

The last stop was to Jilong, home of the famous night market. I like Jilong's night market. I didn't have too much time to check it out, but it's actually not really a night market - it's 24 hours. An odd point of trivia is that in all Taiwanese night markets you will find a temple - which is why the night market exists, I guess because it's a natural meeting place. The Jilong one is pretty awesome. It's smaller than Shilin of course, but densely packed with food, food, and more food. Best place to eat in Taiwan, for sure.

Hopping on the train back to Taipei, I met Tiffany for dinner at the #1 rated beef noodle shop in the country. At least, the one that took 1st place in last years beef noodle festival. It was very good, but sorry, Taiwan. You can't compete with China's noodles - they just do it better over there.

This blog is boring, don't read it!

Seriously, run away! This is your last warning.

I've had a cold for the past few days, which seemed to accompany itself with an annoying headache. So I took off work on Monday, which, I knew would be difficult. For one, we're a 3 teacher operation that is already running short staffed with 2. So classes get shortened, and the school owes some extra hours. But reducing it to 1? I don't know what happened on Monday, but I imagine pretty much half the school closed. I had told my boss I wasn't feeling well that Saturday, so it wasn't entirely unexpected. But her attitude turned into one more akin to a worried mother when I called in.

"Well... make sure you drink plenty of water."
"And get a lot of rest."
"And go see the doctor."

The socialized medicine here really is awesome, but I think Taiwan relies on it too much. They'll go see the doctor for tummy ache. I've had plenty of colds in my life. I know what cures them - time. If you want to be slightly less miserable, antihistamines, antitussives, and analgesics. I don't need to wait for a doctor to tell me what I already know. Gyah, I sound like a stubborn old man.

Anyway, the cold's pretty much gone, and I'll be back to work tomorrow. Speaking of my boss, she has become... I'm not going to say more cool, but I will say less bitchy. She pretty much leaves me alone, and does not do her passive aggressive nonsense nearly as much anymore. I still don't like her, and think she's a fairly bad manager... but she's not quite the scum of the earth that she used to be. But she talks to the local staff really harshly. It's a shame, really. I don't pick up on all of it but, some decorum would be appreciated.

Taiwanese graffiti - we mostly just correct your English

And speaking of Chinese, I'm putting a lot of effort into it as of late. Usually I would try and study 30 minutes a day, but it's closer to two hours now. I don't think Chinese is an exceptionally hard language, but I do think the tools available for it are just plain awful. They all have two problems - they talk at a rapid pace right out of the box, because nobody will talk at a slow pace in the real world. Well no shit. But English 101 should not be taught by the Micromachines guy. And the other problem, which is more of the fault of the government in Beijing, they all teach "standard" Mandarin - which is only spoken around Beijing. It's a weird accent that ends a lot of words with an "R" sound. Nobody else speaks Chinese like that. Not from Qingdao, to Nanjing, to Hangzhou, to Ningbo, not in Dandong, and not in Taiwan. When you speak with the Beijing accent, it's like you're saying "Fuhgetaboutit, let's get a bag-el and caw-fee." You're so stereotypical it's funny.

So for more exciting, travel related things - I went to check out the last noteworthy night market, that I know of, in Taipei. It's also the first night market in Taiwan, so I suppose that's noteworthy. The Raohe Street market is a bit far from the MRT station, but still not super far. It's medium sized, but they do have some pretty great food. Of particular interest was the giant "meat and vegetables in a cone". Of particularer (yeah that's a word) interest was the Oreo shop. This guy sold everything Oreo. Deep fried Oreos, Oreo pudding, Oreo cupcakes, and what I got, the Oreo and Banana smoothie. The kid running it by himself had to be like, 14 years old. He was lightning fast, and chopped up a banana faster than what I thought was humanly possible.

Tiffany and I went to check out a place I had heard about, and was eager to try - the Taipei Miniature's Museum! Say whaaaa? It would seem Taipei has quite a collection of really tiny things. I will say this - those tiny houses are like, really well detailed. Some tiny fingers spent countless hours assembling tiny people to live in their tiny rooms wearing tiny clothes and eating their tiny food. I mean, it was kind of cool. But there are just way too many gorram tiny houses in this place. You can only say "Wow, this is like a regular size place, but really small" so many times before you get fed up with it. I did enjoy the tiny TV, supposedly the smallest in the world. I hope the tiny people had tiny glasses, because the picture on it was terrible.

At the end though, they had Lego models submitted from local schools. HELL. YES. Now this is something I can get behind. It was divided up into various sections, each more amazing. 1) Bicycle Playing Cards (made in Erlanger, KY, whatup) 2) Legends of Chima 3) Halo 4) Star Wars 5) Pirates. If the entire museum was this, I would be so happy. While we were there, we were going through the museum behind this girl who was in her 20s or so. Tiffany and I were trying to guess her English name by shouting out random ones until she turned around. We got into a heated discussion on whether or not "Madeline" is a common English name. I have two students named Madeline, I say it is.

And I will fight that belief to the grave.