I spent this Saturday in the same fashion as last: touring Taiwan with a real Taiwanese family! I had the pleasure of tutoring my student Brian again, and then spent the whole day with his family. Brian and I first read books for an hour and then we had a family lunch that his mom made. Then we played a drumming game on Playstation 2 that was a lot of fun even though none of us really knew how to play it. After screwing around on that for about an hour, we drove into Taipei where Brian took a math class for an hour. While he was there, I went with Frank (the dad) and Nicole (the sister) to the Core Pacific City "Living Mall." This building was truly an architectural marvel located just a few blocks away from Taipei 101. It's difficult to describe it and do the building justice but it's basically a giant ball set into an L-shaped building. I'll post pictures of it shortly for you to be able to see it better. It has a fairly grandiose atrium inside as well as glass elevators, and tons of escalators to allow for many different, interesting vantage points throughout. We wandered around there for an hour or so before heading back to pick up Brian from class. On our way back, we did buy another authentic Taiwanese dish whose name escapes me right now, but it was another icy soup dessert like I had last week, only this time it had noodles in it too.
Then the family and I went to Bali, a little town right on the Danshui river just a few miles from Linkou. We rented bikes and rode along the river for about an hour. This was a lot of fun, although it was very very busy and I'm amazed none of us got into any crashes. It was a relief to be by a river and near the ocean to escape the sometimes insufferable heat Taiwan has in the summer. The highlight of the day bike riding was watching Brian ride with training wheels. Whenever we got to a quiet part of the trail, all you could hear was his training wheels scraping on the ground on one side until he tipped back and started scraping on the other side. Training wheels are just kinda funny. Ha ha.
After Bali, we went to a "western" restaurant in Linkou which was actually pretty good. I knew all of the names of the dishes which was refreshing. The only thing that was strange about my meal was the sauce on the Fettucini Alfredo. I'm about 99% positive there was not any actual cheese in the sauce, but oh well. The whole meal, 5 courses in all, cost about $7 US so that's tough to beat!
When I got back home, I went over to Dan, Lauren, and Jade's house where we proceeded to try out KTV (Taiwanese karaoke) to see what it was like. It is EXTREMELY popular here. It was actually a lot of fun! We got to try it on the top floor of their 15-story building, and we had our own private movie theater basically, as well as a balcony with a lawn and real grass. I don't think I've walked barefoot in grass since I've been in Taiwan so that was cool. Also, come to think of it, today was the first time I've ridden a bike since coming to Taiwan. Anyway, KTV was a lot of fun. We sang some Disney classics, some '80s classics, and other songs of that nature. I definitely wanna try it again in the future. So in all, this was a pretty eventful day and I'm feeling a little tired. I'll put up some pictures soon of the day's events. 'Til next time...
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