Taipei : D

Today I was off with my girlfriend to Taipei to meet up with one of her colleagues she use to work with in a cram school. We had to wake up early to catch the train going to Taipei from Toayuan train Station. It was a cloudy morning so I was hopping for a very cool day.

 I have been living with Sylvia's family for the past week. Tomorrow I will move into my new apartment. This is Sylvia's house it is 5 stories and my room is on the 4th floor. It is a very beautiful house!

 Here we are in the MRT station after arriving to Taipei. We are waiting for Sylvia's friends John to come so we can go eat together.

The restaurant we wanted to eat out wouldn't open for another hour so we walked around Taipei trying to kill off some time.

 We ate at a Japanese restaurant. This is a kind of hot pot called "壽喜燒" . It is kind of hard to explain what the Chinese means but it was very delicious!!

 First you drop the slices of raw meat into the soup to cook them.

 Here you can see the meat cooking. We cooked beef and bacon in the pot.

 The sauce you use is a raw egg with peppers.

 My desert was mango with green tea pudding.

 After eating John had to go to work so Sylvia and me waiting at Taipei Main Station for my host mother to get off work to go visit her and her family.

 Seeing my host family again was great!! I had missed them soooo much! We all went out to eat at a Vietnam restaurant. Here I am drinking Vietnamese milk tea. It taste like regular milk tea but with a coffee after taste.

 My host father, Jerry.

 Some egg rolls.

 Vietnamese beef noodles. They were good but Taiwanese ones are much better!

 Our desert haha. Pineapple ice cream inside a pineapple.

I had a great time in Taipei!! I can't wait to  go visit Taipei and my host family again! On the way back to Taoyuan Sylvia and me were so tired that we fell asleep on the train till we got to our stop ><.

In Taiwan again!

I am currently in Taiwan again!! I am so happy to be back I was very bored in my house waiting for the day that I could go to the airport again. I did however have a great time with my family and friends. I even got to take a trip to the mountains and New York. I feel very jet lagged and will wake up very early in the morning and then at around 1 or 2pm crash and have to go to bed again. I hope that soon I will get use to the time change and start sleeping at a normal schedule.

The plane ride from North Carolina to Taiwan was very long and tiring I woke up at 3am and was in the air for around 29 hours before arriving to Taiwan. The worst ride was the flight from San Francisco to Japan. Even though it was around 12 hours I could not wait for this one to end. Finally on the way to Taiwan I fell asleep on the plane and didn't get a immigration card to fill out. After going through immigration and customs I got my suit cases and was ready to meet my ride. I was just thinking about sleeping at this point I had been awake for too long to want for anything else. Stepping out of the airport I could feel the Taiwanese heat hit me very hard I had forgotten how hot it was in Taiwan!!!

With the weekend coming to an end I need to start to look for an apartment to live in.  

Alishan part 1

Oh what a early morning especially after going to sleep at 2am to wake up at 6am ><. On top of that it was raining!! A 25 minute walk to Nei Li train station in the rain : /. I didn't get too wet so it was not terrible. I was too excited to get to Alishan. We took the 7 minute train ride to Taoyuan train station.
This is David and me waiting for the mountain train to take us to Chiayi. We are all so tired and slept on the 3 hour train ride.

We walked to this bus station and while we were buying tickets a old lady was trying to get us to buy tickets from her. She said her bus was faster and we could go sightseeing and she priced it 1 NT less the then other bus. We bough the tickets from the other bus but we bought her tickets on the way back down. Down is a picture of her. We gave her 100 NT and she wrote down something. So pretty much we hope that she didn't rip us off and her bus will be there.

This was my room. It was a pretty ok room. I had to use slipper to get into the bed room and had special bathroom slippers for the bathroom. I guess very Japanese style.

This is everyone that went on the trip. David on the lower right, his girlfriend Haley to the right of him. And on the top Victoria and teddy. We had to walk up and down all these steps to get to our hotel... a foreshadowing of all the steps we will be climbing soon.

Eating at a restaurant called 999. It was not the best but I was soo hungry I didn't care and just kept eating till I was full.

Here are pictures of the forest at AliShan. It was the most beautiful place I have ever been in my whole life. It looks magical especially because of the mist of the rain.

They really don't want us to "frolicking" anywhere!!!!!!

This tree grew into a "heart shape" it looks really awesome, I think.

This is what you see as soon as you get out of the forest. Like I said before, its so beautiful.

This is the forest behind us that leads out to this opening. It almost look like the evil woods in Snow white.

We walked and found this temple while we were walking down. It looks really nice almost as nice as the one I saw in Taipei.

This picture makes me laugh. But yea the bridge shakes while you walk on it alot.

Here we are starting to walk through a part of the forest where the "big trees" are. By this time we are all soaking wet and a little tired from hiking.