Sorry we haven't done a better job of documenting everything that's going on over here... this jetlag business has been a little tougher than we both thought it would. When we get back to the hotel every night, we are usually just exhausted and it's been all we can do to stay awake. Everytime I sit down to write something I end up dozing off!
We've been having a great time though... I'll try to hit a couple of highlights of what we've been up to the past few days.
On Thursday (New Year's Day) we signed up for a bus tour of the Northern Taiwan coast. On the brochure it had pictures of busloads of tourists so we figured a bus would come to get us and we would do this tour with about 30 - 40 other people. Instead when 1:30 came and it was time for our tour bus to pick us up a man came into the hotel lobby and introduced himself as Chong and led us to the backseat of a minivan. Turns out we were the only ones who signed up for this tour so it was just us!
We were a little nervous at first... I mean, how good can the tour be if no one wants to take it but Chong put our fears to rest very quickly. He spoke very good English and pretty much as soon as we drove away from the hotel he began sharing interesting things about Taiwan with us. He had a great sense of humor and he finally explained why everyone here drives scooters. I asked if he drove a scooter and he said he did... he said "you drive car, city controls you... you drive scooter, you control city." From what we've seen that is most certainly true!
The drive out of Taipei to the northern coast took about an hour and I'll have to say, the coastline here was really amazing. The landscape reminded me a lot of the Highway 101 / Big Sur area in California but the water here was much more violent... the waves were the biggest we've ever seen.
High up on the mountain overlooking the coast was the town of Jioufen which is an old gold mining town that is now famous for its teahouses overlooking the water. Our tour driver said he had never seen it as crowded as it was... New Year's Day is a national holiday here and it seems like the whole island had gone to the coast. We spent about an hour walking through the packed streets before heading back to Taipei... it was really cool. We'll probably do a whole separate post about the markets / shopping here in Taiwan.
We were craving some American type food when we got back from our tour so we headed down to the Taipei 101 area where we found a German / American bar type place... it felt like a fairly typical American brewery style restaurant and best of all, they had an english menu available. It was pretty exciting to find a chicken artichoke pizza and southwestern eggrolls so far from home!
We walked around a little downtown after dinner and we explored the Eslite bookstore which is like their version of Borders but it's seriously like Borders on crack. It was 7 stories tall and every floor had like 5 or 6 other stores as well... it was kind of like a bookstore surrounded on all sides by a mall. They even had a place where they offered music lessons and we saw a fairly young boy receiving painting lessons. This place was seriously huge and really nice. I would have bought a book but there were all in Chinese!
We were pretty tired after this (and it was only like 9:00) so we headed back to the hotel and went to bed. This jetlag is seriously kicking our tails... we normally are night owls but here we have been getting just completely exhausted by around 9 or 10 every night. I can't imagine how goofed up we're going to be when we get home.
Okay... more to come! Thanks for reading.
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