my first leap

So I’m in this crazy situation. I’m in Taitung Centre; and in the library, the office where workers work. It seems the house/hotel we’re staying at, the guy told us we can use the internet here but after asking around, workers here tell us we need a card to use the computers. So we call the guy; he calls a colleague, who goes to the internet room but because the guy who’s working there is a volunteer and doing his job, he wouldn’t let us and then another colleague had to come down and then the internet guy said okay but he’s going to lunch so now I’m in an office using a work computer!! In one morning we have created havoc in the local library abusing our powers, well, someone is using their power for us. Are you confused? I am. But here I am.

Yating, Shihmen (Yating’s sister), Sophia have gone off to find the largest bank here so Sophia can change her HK dollars to Taiwan dollars (Yating keeps asking Sophia if she has her passport – it’s important) and left me here alone tapping away. Now I know how it feels even for a little bit about working in an office here.

The night before leaving Taipei we took the MRT to Zhongxiou Danhua station (we saw 5 westerners!) and Ling picked us up and drove to Tunghua Night Market; Yating met us there later. It seems that you can order Sashimi, Octopus as well as Chinese food in most places. We also had Bamboo shoots, and purple brown sausage eaten with a slice of garlic and coriander , all new to me and very tasty. Ling tell us that Japanese and Korean influences are big in Taiwan because of Japanese occupation and Korean is just very popular right now (Remember what I said about Korea being the new Japanese?). All menus are in Chinese. While we ate, Sophia and I tell Yating and Ling where we walked. They think we’ve walked from one end of Taiwan to the other by their look of shock. So we tell them north of Ximen (the hotel) is where you can get all your cloths/materials; south is where the techno camera stuff are; east, the hospitals/medical stuff and where trendy school kids hangout playing computer games and stuff and in the east wasn’t much stuff.

I left my big backpack at Wonstar Hotel for free. The hotel which is also known as Onestar is pretty cool. You get free porn and lots of movie channels on a the biggest TV I’ve ever seen. Yesterday we had to get up at 5.45am to get the train at 7.10am. We were dawdling (5 mins to go) when this foghorn of a sound blasted our room. It was a fire alarm. I finished off my coffee and we grabbed our stuff and like royalty in chaos, we were escorted out by all the guests in the hotel. Poor woman at the desk; she was being told off big time. We left unscathed. We were told to meet at Taipei Main Station at the 7-11, the most popular convenient store. Luckily Sophia wandered about, we found out there were six 7-11’s with one at each corner of the station! The 7-11’s sell hot steamed buns – I liked the pork and preserved cabbage.

There’s a ladies carriage for women only on the train. Train schedules are in Chinese with no English translations. The seats have lots of space for your legs and the seat reclines lower so I fell asleep during our 6 hours ride. The scenery is breathtaking to put it mildly – deep mountains…

Friends are back. Have to go. Will finish this later.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. – John Locke. English Philosopher who made great contributions in studies of politics, government and psychology. 1632–1704

 

Tags: Taitung, Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 4:01 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.