Tiawan day one
Trip Start
Jun 10, 2006
1
6
30
Trip End
Aug 27, 2006
Teipei,
Taiwan
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Day one
July 5, 2006
Ok Guys sorry if it is a little detailed but this is kind of a journal to. Our fist day in Asia, I must say when I first set foot on it I really wasn't crazy. It is sooo hot. I think it is more hot and humid then Texas. Well as I thought more I was like around the port is more of a port town so I need to be optimistic about what's to come. So Maggie and I decided we would spend a little time calling home. The phone cards I brought didn't work so we bought some but it was only like 5 dollars for a whole hour. Well at like one it was time to head off on my first SAS field program. The Mongolian barbeque and city orientation. It was amazing. The first stop was at the Taipei 101 building. This is the tallest building in the world standing at 508 meters
me outside memorial
. The lower part was a mall that was amazing they had Gucci and everything. Well we went up on the fastest elevator (1,010 meters per minute) in the world and my ears were popping like crazy. As I looked out the view was stunning. I was amazed at how the city blended in with the jungle like landscape. In the middle of the top of the tower there is a 66o metric ton steel ball. This moves when the wind blow to keep the buildings weight from shifting. It is controlled by a computer and is quite amazing.Next stop was the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial. It was like a mixture of the Lincoln memorial and a great garden with a Chinese flare. The pictures do a better job of explaining this. But it was very beautiful and impressive, the amount of money the Taiwanese people put in to honor there late president. We then moved on to one of the Taiwanese national history museums and botanical garden. It was ok. I am still not really at the stage where I appreciate that stuff. So we looked around but I spent more time in the gardens. We were then bound for dinner. I loved it. I ate my very first meal with chop sticks and had my very first Asian beer. There are supposedly places like this in the US so I want to find one because I really liked it. You pick your meat and vegetables and stuff and they are raw you put them in a bowl. You then pick out the sauces you want. The first bowl I had was spicy and the second more teriyaki like. You hand it to the chief and he cooks it and gives it back to you and you eat. It is like a buffet style so I was quite bold on my selections. Well then it was night fall and we went to the lingshan temple of manka, a Buddhist temple. I was really amazed. They had like a huge waterfall in there but the top was all open to the temple which I really liked. There were so many people there and they were all praying and lighting their incense to send their prayers up to Buddha with. They also brought an abundant amount of food and flower sacrifices that lined the table. There were people meditating that seemed so intensely mystified that I was quite moved. We then headed a block up to the night market. This was my favorite part. You could see everything you wanted and didn't want to see here. I made a couple of purchases which I will show and tell when I return. But the food was crazy there. There was dried squid and live bugs. There was this thing that Asia is apparently famous for and it is called drinking snake blood. They literary kill the snake in front of you, skin it, squeeze its blood into a class and mix it with some liquor and you drink. A lot of people did it from the boat but I wasn't so bold. Well I need to get some rest because tomorrow is an early morning. Farwell
Comments
Food in Texas
Lizzie,
There is Pier 8 in Seabrook where you choose your food and they cook it just like that. It is fabulous. Almost all of it is seafood. I always have shrimp and teriyaki sauce and vegetables.
I had lunch with yur mom today. She is very excited about her trip and seeing you.
Have fun.
Joanna