It seems everyone wrote something. then I am going to put up my travel note here. I didn't really mention people's name in the note and just jotted down some interesting things. It is a long one. I appreciate in advance about your patience and perseverence
Last weekend, I went out with friends to Jinshan, a place famous for hot springs in North Taiwan. The trip had a poor beginning. I asked my friend to pick me up on her way to the meeting place, but her car had a flat tire and the battery was dead, too. So she was 30 mins late to pick me up. We rushed to pick up another friend, then to the meeting place and worried we must be the last to arrive. It turned out we worried too much. The coordinator just called she would grab her breakfast on the way, so she might be ten more mins late. Finally, we hit the road and expected to reach Jinshan in 1 hour. Talking, talking, talking, we missed the interchange leading to the northbound freeway. So, it took us 30 minutes more to get off the southbound freeway and get back to the northbound. Fortunately we still arrived at Jinshan before noon. So we went straight to the famous restaurant for duck on the old street.
After lunch, Juming art museum was our first destination. The museum was so so big and most art works are outdoors. I didn’t expect it was so large, and I believe nobody did. The artists who created this museum used metal, painting to make a little bit large scale obsure figures of people, airplanes, and Taiji moves. All figures don’t look like real things, but everyone can tell what the artists want to create at first sight. The most impressive one is a piece which shows the peole getting in line for I-don’t-know-what. Looking from far away, the work is so realistic.
Then we went to Ex-Governor General Hot Spring. It was built up during the Japanese colonization of Taiwan. Japanese loved hotsprings for their comsmatic and therapeutic benefits. When World World Two retored Taiwan back to ROC, it was destroyed for military deployment. Later on, the owner of Ex-Governor General Hot Spring nowadays rebuilt it according to the structure back then. It has many hot spring pools. In the pool on the first floor, customers can dress a swimming suit, but there is no pretty view from there. There are two pools on the forth floor. Men and women’s pools are separated and customers can’t put on a swimming suit, but the panorama of the Jinshan beach is nothing less than pleasant. Of course we chose the forth floor, but it was a little embarrasing to expose all myself to other men, which I hadn’t done in my whole life. However, it was not really as weird as I had thought afterwards. The side of the pool is low, so the private part can show to all passersby on the ground level when customers stand up. So pay attnetion, dude, if you are going there soon. The pool is divided into three parts, one hot, one very hot, and the other cold. We shifted between different parts many times, and my legs almost got a cramp when I shifted from the very hot to cold part, but other people looked fine. Did it mean I might be less healthy and couldn’t adapt to the surroundings?
At night, we planned going to the lover’s lake, another I-don’t-know-what. It was too dark to see signposts, so we missed it and almost drove to Keelung. In the end, we gave up the original plan and just chose a roadside cafe to sit and chat. I forget what we said mostly, but I remember we played card games for a while. One of them did provide excitement: everyone chooses a name and can’t see his cards. Then each player turns over a card from top of the deck in their hands when it is his turn to show a card. When two people have cards with the same number, the one who calls the other’s name more slowly collects all cards on the table and starts another round. When a person runs out of cards in his hand, he wins. And the last two people count how many cards in their hands. The one who gets more cards is the loser and has to pay a penalty. There are many penalties, but they are not the fun part. The fun comes from looking at people fumbling for names they know and forget or stammer because of nervousness.
The next day, everyone was in favor of going to another friend’s house to play Wii and do karaoke. I liked to do some sightseeings, but the karaocke is always good for me. I can come back in the future if I am in the mood anyway.
