Breaks and Turkeys

I know it's been a couple weeks since my last post. Sometimes I can't help it, but I try to make notes so that I can remember the stuff I want to share. At the beginning of last week, we had a gigantic storm, so large that the government actually ordered all schools to cancel for the day. One of the Chinese teachers came upstairs and told us the news. After I heard it, I went right back to sleep. I'm not one to waste such an opportunity. Everyone keeps saying it was a typhoon, but there wasn't enough wind for a typhoon. I went down by the ocean at one point after the worst of the storm had died down, and this is what I found!

This fence was put up because of the construction in the park by the shore. I can't decide if it was the wind or the high waves that did this.

Over the weekend, Steph showed me where the Carrefore store was. It's just a giant grocery store, but while I was there, I saw this aquarium with fish and the glass shelf full of bees.

What really disturbs me about this aquarium is the amount of dead fish that they've left in the tank. How on earth do they expect people to want to buy those fish for food with dead fish in the same water? It's unhealthy! The people who had the shelf of bees were selling lots of honey jars. They convinced me to buy a jar of honey juice mix. I tried a little bit and really liked it, so I said I would buy some after they said they would give me a "special price." Special price my foot. At the end of the day, I walked away with 1000 kwai honey. That's about $35 US! Maybe it doesn't seem to bad for such a big jar, but in a country where most bowls of soup and noodles are 30 kwai, 1000 kwai is nothing to sneeze at!

At least the honey juice is pretty good. That stuff and the chocolate bread I get from the bakeries around here will probably be what gets me through the next couple of months.

This month in the preschool has been holiday month because the holiday season is nearly upon us. So we talk about all the other holidays we can think of. In my classes, we discussed St. Patrick's Day, Thanksgiving, and a bunch of holidays from other countries, like the Japanese Doll Festival and Oktoberfest. These are a couple of pictures of the turkeys we made for our Thanksgiving lessons. We've already done hand turkeys, so I figured we could do something else. The first picture was taken while the turkeys were still works in progress. Not bad considering the artists were 3 years old!

And here's a pic of the artists with their creation. There are actually 20 more students with the other turkey, but it pretty much looks the same as this one.

I've found a couple restaurants with American food. One is called the Country Mother's, which is pretty good, but definitely overpriced. A small pizza was actually one of their less expensice meals. The other restaurant is called Frankie's Dogs and it's actually owned by the father of one of my kids at the preschool. I was riding around trying to find the Country Mother's restaurant when I found Frankie's Dogs by accident. It was raining so I decided to stop and get dinner. The restaurant was decorated for a local sports team celebration, but they had time to feed me. There was a group of curious people at a nearby table who started asking me questions about why I was in Hualien and eventually they invited me to play a card game with them. In was very fun even if I barely understood what they were saying.

So last weekend was also the time for the Taiwanese national holiday. We got Monday off (making this the second 4-day week. I love those!). I went up to Taipei by myself, mostly because I wanted to have a break in the big city and I wanted to do whatever I wanted at my own pace. There's something so liberating about doing something by yourself. But I met a few people while I was there that could show me the ropes of the subway system and tell me the best places to go. If I told you everything about my trip to Taipei in this post, it would take forever. So I'm going to be chopping it up in 2 parts.

I left early Saturday morning, tying my luggage to the back of my bike like Steph did with the big suitcase of the old teachers' stuff a couple months ago. I was able to get on my train and slept on the train, but when I got to Taipei, I realized that I didn't really have a plan. I thought I could look for a brochure with a map of the area, but that was harder to find than I thought, so I fnally ducked into a Starbucks and got on the internet so I could at least find the address for my hostel.

The hostel was really nice and the owner could speak English pretty well, so she was able to recommend a couple places to me. She was the one who told me that the National Palace Museum has free admission on Saturdays from 5 PM - 8PM. I wanted to go to Taipei 101 (which is apparently a shopping mall, but I didn't know it. I always thought it was a big office building like every other skyscraper in America) and luckily the hostel was only a few blocks away.

There it is! In sight!

About ten minutes later and it's getting closer (I think)!

I can't help but think of a trip to Chicago that my family and I took years and years ago. My dad, brother, and I wanted to see the Sear's Tower and we could see it in the distance. We thought we could walk to it, it seemed so close. But after an hour of walking, it never seemed to get any closer. Luckily, I had a lot of beautiful streets to look at during my trek to Taipei 101.

And finally, the entrance to the mall.

I didn't have nearly as much time as I wanted to explore the mall. What I really wanted to do was go to the top of the building, where they had even more stores. It took a little money to go up and the wait for the elevator ride was 20 minutes, but it was totally worth it! That elevator only took about 30 seconds to go up 80 floors! That's crazy!

Here are a couple views from the top of the tower:

The tour guides gave me an English audio tour to listen to while I walked around the top, which was mostly describing the buildings. The building above with the yellow roof is the Sun Yat-sen memorial and the lower picture is of the big fancy-shmancy shopping center of Taipei. Don't let me wander around there by myself too long or I would spend every cent I had.

This is the mascot for Taipei 101 called a Damper Baby. Am I the only one who thinks of Pampers diapers when I hear that?

A model of the high-speed elevator.

And here we see the damper for the building. This is the first time I've heard of it. It's apparently the thing that keeps the building from wobbling every time there's wind. If it weren't for this, I can't imagine what being in the tower would be like during a typhoon! This is the only damper in the world that normal tourists can see.

The top floors also had a coral jewelry store with some pretty impressive displays.

Need I remind you that all of this, except for the clothes, is made of coral?

On that day, the outside observation deck was open. It was windy, but not too cold and I got some impressive pics.

And here we have a typical Chinese take-out box.

Well, that's all there will be for tonight. I'll talk about the rest of my trip in the next post. And here's a pic of me next to some cool looking bronze statues in a park.