And God Made Godfrey

So, last night we went to this little Mexican restaurant that we'd been to a few times before. There were seven of us, so we reserved a table and it was a good thing because when we got there another table was set aside for a larger group and- BAM- the restaurant was fully occupied. We had a lovely meal and as we ate the other table slowly filled with more and more beautiful people talking about LA and other famous things.


Our neighbor, Christine Sr., started having a hot flash because she was pretty sure that they were "famous" models. We weren't really paying much attention to them because we had no idea who they were. After a while, Christine Sr. went to the washroom and while she was in there one of the "famous" people stood up to go to the washroom too. She hadn't noticed this particular "famous" person in the restaurant before but she reported that when she opened the bathroom door and saw him standing there she couldn't even make eye contact- she was so star struck. He was Godfrey. Godfrey Gao is some 12 foot tall actor who has recently become pretty popular in Taiwan, and he's just released a book full of pictures of himself. In fact, at one point during our meal we noticed him reading his own book and admiring his self-portraits.


When we left the restaurant Christine Jr. noticed that he had stuck his long neck up and looked at us. Wow! Based on this one glance as we left the restaurant all the lady teachers here are now in love with this guy. They haven't stopped talking about this guy for the last 24 hours. Christine Jr. even walked into a store today and nabbed a copy of "Men's Body" magazine with Godfrey on the front and has been making out with the cover ever since. This was one of two magazines he was on the cover of. So famous!


This is a picture taken at his book signing less than a week ago. Wouldn't these girls just die to know that we were sitting at THE NEXT TABLE from him at some burrito place, paying no attention to this guy at all? And now all my friends are in love with him and are making plans to stake out the Mexican restaurant every night until he returns.

Does Your Sign Hang Low?

There are a lot of canvas signs hanging in Taiwan advertising this or that, but since Taiwan is an island and it can sometimes be windy the signs are blown around easily. The solution? Businesses take two plastic bottles, fill them with water and tie them to either end of the sign. The sign doesn't blow in the wind anymore, but now you've got two transparent bottles of liquid hanging at eye-level, just waiting to be walked into by a unobservant Canadian. Throw in a few scooters, cars parking on the sidewalk, broken crosswalk lights and uneven sidewalks with these bottles-of-death and WHY is it that I don't have travelers insurance??

2 Da An Parks and The Museum of Contemporary Art

On Tuesday I met Nareesa after lunch and we took the MRT to the Da An district of Taipei to visit Da An Park. I read online that Da An Park is the biggest park in the city and is considered by some to be the "Central Park" of Taipei. When we got off the MRT we checked one of the station's maps and noticed that there were 2 Da An Parks listed: Da An Park and Da An Wood Park. We walked towards Da An Park and were met with the crappiest little strip of land tucked away behind some apartment buildings and noodle shops. At least this sad excuse for a park had some teeter-totters for us to play on. After teetering and tottering, we walked towards the "Wood Park".


When we got to the "Wood Park" the sign simply read "Da An Park" and it was huge. We were obviously at the right place. Luckily, these two spots were only about 15 minutes apart. There were lots of people relaxing, reading and enjoying the nice weather.


There were some stone trails to massage your feet near the pond. Also around the pond were a bunch of people exercising and doing tai chi. Asians love public exercise, and I love watching it.


We found an ampitheater where I was able to jump on stage (where I rightfully belong).



On the other side of the amphitheater we saw this woman, who I'm assuming is famous for some reason, surrounded by paparazzi- so of course we joined in and snapped some photos too. It was nice not to be the one surrounded by cameras for a change! Anyone know who this woman is? She struck that pose and never moved once the whole time we were there. Fierce!


Then we started climbing things. We climbed trees, went on a few slides and climbed to the top of this jungle gym. I would highly recommend Da An Park to get your inner monkey out.


After we were done at the park we took the MRT to Zhongshan Station and visited the Museum of Contemporary Art. This has got to be the coolest museum I've ever visited (except maybe the Smithsonian)!! It was so fun. They are currently running the Animamix Biennial- Visual Attract and Attack exhibition. Admission was only $50NT ($1.75CAN), an amazing price for all the cool stuff we saw. You could easily spend a lot of time here. All of the exhibits were statues, videos and paintings influenced by animation, including (clockwise, above) fetal superheroes, a lion horse wearing a tux, hundreds of metal ants surrounding a staircase and a very life-like severed head.


(clockwise) fetus Hitler, fashionable people, knit milky booby milky weiner lady, a tiger and her cub. If you're wondering why I'm wearing those hot glasses- they were our admission tickets. When we went up the second floor exhibits a lady asked me for my ticket and I had to take the glasses off my face to show her. She'd thought they were my real glasses. Lookin' good, Keddy.


Many of the exhibits were interactive, which added to the fun. This room (above) was filled with probably 30 or 40 LCD touch screens, each with the same cartoon guy on the screen. When you touched the screen he did something amusing.

If you pressed "D" on the keyboard, they'd dance. If you pressed "K" they'd kiss. If you pressed "F" they did something else.

Happy, whistling head.


Another room was filled with four "flowers" and each "flower" had a soundproofed "blossom" hanging from it. Inside each blossom there was a different cartoon playing. The animators were from all over the world and did really innovative work. We spent a lot of time in this room!

Aaaaand because no trip out is complete without some awesome adventure in dining, we hit up Taipei Main Station's food court for tatziki chicken pitas. Mmmm... just looking at this picture makes me want another one, though it does take me a while to scrape out all the damn lettuce they stuff into the thing.

Another Tuesday win!

Taroko Gorgeous

On Monday, Mel and I went to Taroko Gorge, which is a 19KM marble canyon located about 20 minutes from the city of Hualien on the east coast of Taiwan. The bright blue waters of the Liwu river run at the base of cliffs that are as high as 3800 meters in places. This was a day where everything around us was B I G and before long my neck felt stiff from looking up so much.


We woke up in our hotel at 7:20am and 10 minutes later we had a complimentary breakfast delivered to our room. After eating we went down to the hotel's "5-star" lobby to wait for our tour bus. We were the first ones on the bus so we were able to nab the front seat, which would later give us great views through the front window. However, the roads around Taroko Gorge are narrow (at times the lanes become wide enough for one car only) and the bus often seemed to drive within inches of the side of the mile-high cliffs- which made our great view through the front window a little freaky. There were moments when I was sure that we would be getting a very unique view of the gorge by flying off the cliff! There were palpitations at times...


The bus first stopped at the park headquarters for around 20 minutes, which gave us time to grab a coffee and have a quick photo shoot. The tour was entirely in Chinese so we had no idea where we were, how long we were stopping for or when to be back at the bus, but luckily after this stop a fellow tourist who spoke English began translating for us.


The bus headed uphill and let us off for another photo shoot. Check out how blue that water is.


Next we stopped at a recreation area to take more pictures and enjoy the view. On the drive to our next destination we also saw some snow! The elevation was high enough that at the very peak of some of the mountains you actually can see snow in Taiwan. You'd have to climb pretty high to build a snowman, y'all.


The last stop before lunch was at the base of a gravel trail where we hiked for about half an hour. The guy who was translating for us wasn't sure why the bus would have us hike here because, in his opinion, it "wasn't beautiful". For a while, he was right- it was just a hike through the woods with no views of anything! Interestingly, he told us that around a hundred years ago this was a trail that headhunters used to travel around. Headhunters? A hundred years ago?? That seems a little recent.


About halfway through the hike we got a little wet walking behind a small waterfall before we reached a pitch-dark cave. The cave was a little twisty so for a period of about 30 seconds we couldn't see a thing until we made a turn and some natural light started to shine in. It was pretty cool!


On the other side of the cave we crossed a small suspension bridge and walked along a steep cliff and enjoyed awesome views of the bright blue river and massive white marble rocks far below.


For lunch we were sat 10 to a table and huge plates of food were brought out for everyone to enjoy, buffet style. My idea of a good buffet features far less fish heads and shrimp with beans than what we were provided with. If you enjoyed seafood, this was probably a good meal but I just kind of picked at the bony chicken and tough beef while eating bowls and bowls of rice. Mmmm... white rice.


After lunch we drove to the Tunnel of Nine Turns, where we walked through nine man-made tunnels on the road along the edge of the gorge for about 30 minutes. This was a really scenic area, and right around the time that we arrived here I realized that my camera battery was basically dead. Sucks!! Also, at the start of the trail there is a sign that says "Caution: Falling Rocks", and check out the rocks in the picture above that have fallen!


Luckily, we were provided with snazzy hard hats- though I'm not sure how effective they'd be if one of those boulders decided to fall on us.


The last stop on our tour was the Eternal Spring Shrine, which was built to honor all the people who died making this area. The shrine, nestled on the side of a lush green cliff, looks really colorful and is one of the major landmarks of Taroko Park. The waterfalls, with all their branches, looked especially impressive.


At the shrine. Camera dyyyyyinggggggggg.


After we left the shrine a woman dressed like a gypsy hopped on our tour bus and tried to sell everyone some fish and pork jerky with mushroom powder. It looked like she made a killing, but not from us. We were then driven to a beach, where we hung around for 45 minutes or so. I'm not sure why we were brought to the beach because I don't think it's part of the park, but it was possibly because the tour had ended close to an hour early. The beach was really nice, though, and the air was warm.

We got dropped off at the train station with close to 3 hours before our train was due to leave. When I orginally booked our tickets I didn't know what time the tour would finish, so I chose a later time to be safe. Since we knew that there wasn't really much to see or do in Hualien we had our tickets changed to 4:30, so we were able to leave within 10 minutes of getting there and we got home with lots of time for Mel to work on her lesson planning for the next day. Me? I still had one more day off! It's a rough life.

Hualien

Taroko Gorge was the number one thing I wanted to see when I came to Taiwan, and Hualien is the closest city to the Gorge. On Sunday, we finally had the opportunity to travel to Taiwan's east coast to spend a day in Hualien before going to the Gorge on Monday. The high speed railway doesn't travel on the east coast, so after breakfast we took a normal train for about 2.5 hours down to Hualien.


We passed some nice scenery on the trip down, including the eastern coastline and countless rice paddies (above).


Possibly my favorite part of the trip to Hualien was our hotel room! We stayed at the C'est Juene Hotel because it was affordable ($60CAN) and it was the highest rated Hualien hotel on Tripadvisor. A driver picked us up at the train station, free of charge, and when we got to the hotel we were greeted by an English speaking staff. They gave us a map and showed us how to get to a few places of interest. However, the best best part of the hotel was the bed! It was so soft!! After sleeping on rock hard Asian beds for 3 months, the mattress felt amazing. The room was even fitted with speakers that played music (notably, FloRida's "Low") into the room on-demand.


The hotel was only a 10 minute walk from the beach, which we headed to immediately because we knew the sun would soon go down. It was December 6th we were walking under palm trees and finding coconuts on the ground- pretty awesome!


We relaxed on the beach for a while, watching the huge blue waves, skipping stones and ignoring the factories sitting on the water to our right and left.


All along the coast there is a bike trail dotted with loads of statues and other things to see.


We spotted this oddly tall and narrow pine (?) tree growing in someone's yard. That's right- someone has a yard in Hualien, a sure sign that you're in a smaller city in Taiwan. Another thing we immediately noticed about Hualien was the massive lack of traffic. We were able to walk in the middle of the road outside of the main shopping area. It was kind of nice to have a day away from the scooters! That being said, I can't imagine actually living in Hualien!! It was a good place to visit for a day, but other than the coast there wasn't much to see that you can't see in any other city only on a much bigger scale. We went to the main commercial district, which was really just a couple of streets with the same old stores you'd see anywhere, and here are the highlights:


Pet store with cats, bunnies, birds and... a chicken?


Coffin shop, with all the hot models displayed on the street.


Chicken fried corn on the cob for sale at the local KFC.


The night market, which was really just a bunch of carnival games with a few vendors selling organs or fireworks. I was a little disappointed because I was hoping to try some new snacks, but I wound up getting some ramen at a Family Mart instead. I would say the number one thing to buy at this night market was cheap fireworks, so we sat by the water again and watched some people set theirs off. We even saw a 2 year old toddler running around with a fistful of fireworks! We had to get back to our hotel kind of early because we needed to wake up at 7:20 AM (!!!!) for our Taroko tour but the bed was so nice I just wanted to spend the day there..............

School Is A Lot More Fun When You Don't Have To Work, Plus: Sanchong Night Market

On Friday night, we finally made use of our access to a projector and surround sound by spending a couple hours at our school's library watching a movie. We ordered some Dominos (our favorite!) and watched "Christine", an 80s horror movie (the best kind!) based on the Stephen King book. We work with a Christine, we live next door to a Christine... hmm, how did we wind up deciding to watch this?


Saturday was our school's 51st anniversary, so each class set up a tent to sell snacks or to play games to win prizes. The teachers (except me!) operated a haunted house until noon. All day Friday the teachers worked together to dust off old garbage bags and tape them to the dusty light fixtures in Study Room 2 with a homemade ladder. Yes, I know it's December and Halloween was 2 months ago. The English Club ran a haunted house for what seemed like a month in October and it was "very successful" thanks to head club teacher, Nareesa- so by popular demand it was brought back for the school anniversary and over $4000NT was raised for an orphanage made. The school gave us $200NT in vouchers to buy stuff from the kids, so after the haunted house foolishness was over I walked over to the school to check out the scene. I was really surprised at how much was going on at the school... the picture above probably only captures about 1/5 of the tents that were there that day.


The kids were selling just about anything you could think of to eat or drink, and they were pretty good salespeople. When they saw us walk by they ran out to try to get us to buy from them. Frankly, they shook us down! One thing that several booths were selling, which I found quite interesting, was cups of liquid nitrogen with pop or juice poured on top. This made for a cool, smokey looking cup of liquid but a) should 12 year olds be playing with liquid nitrogen? and b) should you really drink it? Mark seemed to think it tasted fine.


There's were lots of ratty looking Disney characters walking around. Check out our photo-op with Mickey's lesser-known cousin, Rickey the rat. Speaking of photo ops, we were surrounded by paparazzi all afternoon! Adults and kids we'd never seen before kept coming up to request pictures with Mel and I. It was a bit much but now I know how Brangelina feel!


Near the end of the afternoon I went to see a favorite student's magic show. I don't teach him anymore (Christine stole him from me) but this kid, Tom, is an amazing little magician. He's only 13 and he put on a 30 minute performance that would put King's County's own Al Bernard to shame. Dude's gonna wind up in Vegas.


Mel and I just spent the afternoon relaxing (she'd had an early morning of haunted house-ing) and then we met up with all the teachers and our neighbor, Christine to go to the Sanchong Night Market. I love going to night markets with Christine because she can read the damn signs and she always helps us order different food and negotiates prices for us. I teach part-time at a school in Sanchong, but other than the street that I walk on to go from my bus stop to the school, I really don't know the city at all so it was cool to go to a new area with our tour guide. This was the narrowest, longest, most crowded night market I've ever been to. At times you couldn't even move! This caused a problem when, in the middle of an un-moving crowd, Mark had to pee.


I was pretty hungry and our first stop was this veggie cart, where the girls got wraps and the guys looked around for something unhealthy.


I wound up getting some cream filled cakes and an "England Potato" from a cart. Man, it was good! Although I had the option of getting a fruit potato, thai chicken potato and tuna potato, I went with ham and cheese. Mmmmm!


One of the neater foods on offer were these doughy grilled rice sticks that came with quite a few topping options- Mel got chocolate- that were really, really good. Will definitely try these again.


At the end of the night Mel had bought a cold papaya milk and Nareesa had bought a bag of organs. Mel's hands were cold from holding the milk tea, so Nareesa kindly offered her bag of organs to warm up Mel's hands. That's what friends are for! We had to go home to pack for an early train ride to Hualien, so we went back to our apartment to get ready for the next day. However, I leave you with this question to ponder:


Does your school have a room with a sign like this on the door? Because ours does. What do you think it's for??? When we asked our boss she responded very sheepishly, "Oh, is a special room..."

What!