Hi Everyone! Today is Moon Festival Day which is a huge holiday in Chinese culture; it's a day where families get together and eat some delicioius mooncake. It's great because holiday = long weekend for me! I'll be hopping on a bus for 5 hours (depending on traffic, which I'm sure there'll be lots of) to Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan which also happens to be the second largest city on the island. Angie and I will be spending the weekend with her friend and her friend's family learning how families here celebrate this important Chinese holiday.

I'm really excited to be able to explore other parts of Taiwan; I haven't been out of Taipei since I've gotten to Taiwan because of how hectic everything has been. Angie's friend will be picking us up from the bus station tonight in Kaohsiung and taking us to join her family for an annual barbeque. It's been a tradition here for the past ten years to have the family get together and have a barbeque on Moon Festival Day, it's kind of like an American July 4th. I'll be back in a few days with lots of pictures and lots of stories to tell. Have a great weekend everyone!!!

Posted by Natalie at 04:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So Willy, Angie, Jon and I have been waiting so long to visit Dan Shui and we finally went yesterday. It's quite far from our school so it was a pretty long MRT ride but definitely worth it. Dan Shui is known for having lots of great food including really tall ice cream and since it's at a pier, for having fantastic scenery. When we first got there, I was surprised to see how crowded it was and how there was the widest selection of food I've ever seen in Taipei. I went straight for the barbequed squid and fresh watermelon juice (my favorites) while Angie began her search for the tall ice cream.

There is a part of Dan Shui called Fisherman's Wharf which attracts a lot of tourists, just like the Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. We finally found the ice cream; it cost 10NT (about $.33 American) for a small and 20NT (around $.66) for a large. All the locals walking around got the small but Angie and I, being the foreigners that we are, HAD to get the big ones. I couldn't even finish it and had to throw it away but it's one of those things you do just for the fun of it. We then paid 39NT (around $1.10) for roundtrip tickets to take a ferry over to Ba Li, which is on the other side of Dan Shui. The first thing we did at Ba Li was rent a 4 person bike to get around. It was so crowded there that it would've been impossible to get anywhere on the bike if it wasn't for the bell we had. Ba Li had even more great food including fresh sugar cane juice, barbequed corn, deep fried crab, squid, etc. and we just sat in the middle of the road in our rented bike, eating. I wonder why people were staring at us...

We then took the ferry ride back to Dan Shui and met up with some other friends from our program. All 9 of us decided to take sticky pictures; the sticky picture booths in Taiwan are really advanced and could hold a lot of people. We were pretty much pooped after that so we had a quick dinner at McDonalds and headed home. I had so much fun yesterday and I would definitely say that Dan Shui is the one place I've been to in Taipei with the best and widest selection of "Xiao Chi" or snacks. Check out my photo album to see all the different kinds of foods that were there!

Posted by Natalie at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)