Winter is coming. Despite this, I made the journey to the north.

Blah blah Taiwan sucks at being cold, damn this hot weather, where's snow, etc. At night it gets to be around 70 degrees here. Shocking, I know. But I have already seen people wearing jackets and gloves. It's like a bizzaro world where the laws of physics are reversed, and more clothes make you cooler. Anyway since I live in a city who literally has "North" in its name, it's not possible to get much more north. Something I wanted to see though, were the ports of Guandu and Bali. For no reason other than I see boats go to them.

Guandu is a park and Bali is an industrial area. Well, moving on.

During the trip the bus stopped at some museum so I hopped off. It was a bit small, but free, so that's good. Some ROC pilot back in the 60s was flying over Taipei when he noticed his compass go crazy. It turns out there was a huge deposit of iron in the ground, which revealed some sort of ancient burial site. The museum was mostly boring, with your standard assortment of old things. All in all it was a pretty dull day, but at least I took the mystery out of the boat destinations. At the industrial park, I did stop at a beef noodle restaurant though. They had a sign outside saying they won some sort of award, and I believe it. This was hands down the best beef noodle I've had in the city. That one in Taipei Main Station? Move over chumps, you suck. Some mom and pop place in the middle of nowhere is better. I'd go there more often if it wasn't so far away.


For more exciting news, I also made a journey to the east. I don't really have a command of Game of Thrones geography to know what is east, so... where the Dolthraki are, I guess?

Tiffany and I went to Jiufen, and I went again by myself to climb some mountain I thought looked cool. Jiufen is really awesome. Taiwan had a gold rush back in the day, which the Japanese were all too busy to get their hands on. Jiufen became a mini El Dorado for a while, and brought in a lot of cash. Then the gold dried up. A lot of people did pack up and move. But the one's that stayed said "Actually, this town is pretty cool, let's turn it into a tourist thingy." And that they did, but again - totally worth it. It's basically ripped out of a movie, sitting on the side of a mountain up in the clouds. The old street was really cool, a narrow corridor of alleys twisting through the city leading to god knows where, jam packed with people and vendors. I bought a reasonably priced ocarina, and the food - oh god, so much food. Wash it all down with a Coke Tea (it tasted very weird) for a good time. They have an old movie theatre there playing movies from the 70s for free, so we caught one of those as well. As I said I went back to hike a mountain I saw there, which was definitely up in the clouds. I did manage to squeeze one pic of the city down below during a cloud break, though.

Anyway after Jiufen it was a dash back to Jilong to get some dinner. On the way we walked through a park that was completely filled with cats. So many cats, it gave me paws. But they were being fed by the locals, so it wasn't a complete catastrophe. Anyway I'm going to stop milking these cat puns meow.