I have probably had my most enjoyable times in Taiwan recently. When I first arrived it was purely sitting around doing nothing and waiting for something to happen. But since I have been enrolled into a language course, I have made friends we have gone out and it has been fun. Learning Chinese has been difficult, but I just need to practice more which I’m finding hard to do with so many distractions such as the internet and going out frequently now. But I have also picked up a few words here and there and I now know how to order my favorite food if I want it. Ordering drinks is a bit of an experience though, you always get a smirk from the cashier or worker who can recognize your foreign accent. It is funny when a cute girl is serving me though, as I am attracted to girls. I also never really had it in me to like or find Asian girls attractive, but since I’ve been in Taiwan, I have become more attracted to them. Maybe because they look cute or what, I don’t know… ?
So where have I been?
1. Sun Moon Lake
Around a week ago, I went on a trip with my university to a place called Sun Moon Lake. It is famous for being beautiful, has an amusement park accompanied with decent roller coasters and a few decent rides. (Not the best amusement park rides, but the scenery and the atmosphere makes it all the worthwhile)
The pictures likely cannot credit enough the beauty of the place I visited (Pictures located down below), but the place I went to was absolutely breathtaking. I enjoyed the scenery very much. Living in the UK or the outskirts of London, I only saw farm-land which has no comparison to big beautiful hills and mountains surrounded by the aurora (Or what it seemed like) of the beautiful sky-line against the back-drop of the mountains.
2. Tiger Bowling
Okay so my other UK friend who I met in Taiwan asked me to get together a group of people to go bowling at this place called “Tiger Bowling”. A quite popular place to go to play bowling. It was fun. Even though I sucked at bowling, it was an experience I otherwise would not have had. I organised most of the guys to come and some or only a few of them invited others. But in the end we got together a group of around 14. Originally Kenan (A friend I met in Taiwan who is from the UK, as said) only wanted 3 or 4 people to come. But I think it was fun that we had a lot more turn up. It definitely shows that foreign students want to have to fun and you can instantly create that by not going out. Some people missed out, as they wanted to revise for the test we had the day after. Though I think I passed that, even though I hardly did any revision.
3. Shubu Shubu
My cousin took me to a nice big restaurant near where he lived via Scooter. It was fun and I am getting used to riding on scooters and not being as scared as I was when I first got one one.
I didn’t take any pictures of this place or where we went after we had dinner, but the food was really nice. Basically you would collect your own food, sort of like a buffet and then you would cook the food yourself in a bowl that was being heated. I had bacon, fish and other types of meat along with other food. I then had watermelon to stop me eating. The cost of the food wasn’t bad for UK-standards, as that type of place would have cost me a lot more in the UK.
After dinner, we went to a bowling alley. Unfortunately we couldn’t bowl since it was very crowded and there were no alleys we could bowl down that were free. Instead we played billiards or pool. I played this previously in the day, so I had a slight advantage over everyone since they had not played the game in a long time. We took turns, but my team usually won. In the end it was like 3-1. I also did something horrible to my cousin. He was setting up the table and the white ball was on the table, I took a shot at one of the holes and ball went flying off the table and hit his head. I could not stop laughing, but I did deeply apologize for this mistake! He was of course cool and kind of laughing along with me with his friends.
Pictures of all the events
I do have a lot more pictures, but they are kind of private since I don’t want to post any one’s identity or faces online without their permission.
All-in-all, not a bad couple of days.
