I'm really starting to scrape the barrel of things to do, here.

This time, I popped out to the city of Taoyuan, and down south to Daxi. Taoyuan is a medium sized city right next to Taipei, most popularly known as the city with the airport. But they're semi big in their own right, and in fact have just started construction on a subway. Their public transportation is pretty crappy, so I'm glad. I didn't really stay much in Taoyuan, just kind of a stopover for Daxi. However next time I'd like to go back to Taoyuan and explore just it on my own.

Down to Daxi, Tiffany and I checked out the old street. Old streets are pretty generic I've found, but this is my favorite one so far. Yes they're peddling the same things, but doing it in a very artful way. Sure it's touristy, but I liked it nonetheless. Also, there was a guy handing out samples of bread stuffed with cheese and cranberries. This bread is awesome and should be made the bread standard. The old street also has a heck of a view of the nearby river. It's too bad this place is so far out, because I'd come back here more if it was closer.






Nearby Daxi is a park that is the burial place of Chang Kai Shek. You may think he is buried in the giant memorial in Taipei. As a logical person would. But in fact, they stuck him in a park. I don't know why, and unfortunately we arrived not 10 minutes too late, as they were closing. CKS doesn't like visitors right before dinnertime, you see. So instead we walked around his park, which is weeeeeeeird. See, up until the late 80s Taiwan was actually kind dictatorial since it was under martial law. Then some 10 years ago, CKS's party lost to another one. This guy said "Ok, all those CKS statues we have in EVERY school around the island - NOPE. Send them here." So they did, and the end result is a park filled with hundreds of CKS statues. It's weird, creepy, and reminds me of the Statue level in Goldeneye. Alright, maybe it's not so creepy then. Maybe if Sean Bean was there.

On the way back we stopped at what I can only describe as a cute house for tourists. It was a Bavarian style building, filled with cute things. It was free to get in, as it was also a shop. I just do not understand the purpose of this place. "We have some land next to a dead president's park." "Well clearly we must build a building like it's in the Alps, and fill it with cartoon cows, hearts, play Gangnam Style over the speakers, and sell sausages in front of the fake church."

Tiffany got accepted to a University in the States, so it looks like I will be flying solo come January. She is travelling to the magical land of Kansas, in a town of 25,000 people. It will be interesting. As part of the move, we needed to get her a new computer. Out to Gunghwa, a kind of electronic flea market in downtown Taipei. I love this place. It has everything. If I may nerd out for a minute, I really hate buying computers in a brick and mortar place. You have salesmen telling you, "This computer can do this, this computer can do that." No, what you're talking about is software. Every computer can do it, it just does some things better than others. After finally settling on one, we walked around asking every vendor "This is the computer we want, and the price that was quoted - can you beat it?" After 3 or 4 people telling us to get lost, go buy it from them, she did go buy it from them. All in all it was about 20% off the list price, so I think that's a good deal.

After that, it was a Chinese lesson in Banqiao Train Station. Banqiao Train Station is really cool, and better than Taipei Main I think. It has this giant cafeteria style restaurant called the Food Republic. I had a fun time speculating what a Food Democracy, a Food Dictatorship, etc would be like. Feel free to leave a comment with your own form of Culinary Government.