In Taiwan!

Well, I'm in Taipei now. I'm up in the Taipei Fullerton Hotel, which has been one of the nicer hotels we've been to on this trip (and we've booked it ourselves - go us!). I guess you'd like to hear about the rest of my stay in Hong Kong and what I've done so far in Taipei. Well, you're in luck.

On Wednesday night we explored Kowloon with John and Ilyana. We saw a laser light show put on by various buildings on the Hong Kong skyline and went to a night market, where we ate and I got a duffel bag for rather cheap. The duffel bag looks pretty cool, but smells rather bad. We're going to try to wash it and if that doesn't work, we're going to trash it.

On Thursday we took a tour to Lantau Island. On the tour we saw the world's longest suspension bridge (97 m longer than the Golden Gate!), a beach in Lantau, a fishing village in rather rough shape, and the world's largest bronze Buddha statue (where the building under it housed some fragments of the historical Buddha). Our tour guide on Lantau had fantastic English, but seemed rather depressed about the rough state of Tai O, the fishing village. Overall, it was a great tour.

That night we took the ferry to Hong Kong Island and took an escalator to SoHo, where we had a couple of drinks and ate Mexican food. We had an Indian woman serving two Americans Mexican food in Hong Kong. How's that for globalization? When we got back I contacted Tova, a girl who toured with me, and we went to a bar on Knutsford Terrace, where we had a few drinks and reminisced about the tour.

The next day we had a laid back morning, since our bus to the airport didn't leave until 10:30. We got a chance to see everyone on our tour and say goodbye to them, which was nice. We packed up, printed off some things for Taiwan, checked out, and hopped the bus to the airport. We were rather early for our flights (we went on separate planes) so we ate some pizza at the airport before going to my mom's gate (she left first). My flight left an hour and a half later so I sat at the gate watching DVDs until the plane was ready to leave. It was a rather large airplane, and I got an exit row seat. While that did afford me a lot of leg room, the seat was far too narrow for me and it wasn't the most comfortable flight. Luckily it was only an hour and a half flight. After landing and getting my bag, I met my mom in the airport, who had arranged a car to our hotel.

After settling in the hotel, I got in touch with Monica, a friend of mine in Taipei. We're meeting today to get accustomed to Taipei. After talking to her we went around to find a place to eat. We stopped at a dumpling restaurant where we had an arrangement of dumplings and pot-stickers. Oddly enough, the most interesting thing that we got there was our drink, 黑豆酱: it was sort of like soy milk, except made from black beans. With lack of anything better to do, we headed back to the hotel and turned in early.

We just ate breakfast and now we're getting set for the day. We're going to go walk to the campus area to see what it'll be like then we're going to meet with Monica. Other than that, we'll see what happens. Glomski out.