You got your way Steve and Ragan. I finally posted pictures of our trip to Germany. It’s nine whole gallery pages of German fun. I may be missing a few pictures from the last day that I was roaming the city alone, but I may post those later. We’ll see just how ambitious I get. That’s it for now. Enjoy.
I finally posted the pictures from our rafting trip to the lower Deschutes river. The first half of the gallery are my pictures, and the second half are Dave’s pictures. So if you’re confused by the order of things, that should help explain it. Anyway, it was amazing. It was a great male bonding experience, complete with camping, beer-drinking, steak grilling, hammocking, hiking, snakes, and pure white knuckle fear. This trip was particularly great, because I got to spend some guy-time with my dad and my brother. It was a rare opportunity, because we all live so far apart. It was good for the soul. A huge thanks must go out to my Uncle Jim for organizing the whole thing.
I was a bit late in posting this set of photos, and actually got the Cathedral hiking pix up first. I guess I was just swamped with life for a while. At least I beat Dave, who promised to produce a video of this trip. I can’t wait to see what he does with that. He risked his camera getting doused and got some good footage of the rapids we went through.
Enjoy the photos. Until next time.
Have you caught on to the latest internet craze? I’m talking about the LOLCats. I am not usually one to jump on the bandwagon with these things, but after a recent trip to Yosemite I just couldn’t resist. Last weekend, a group of us drove up to Yosemite and backpacked up to the Cathedral Lakes area(check out the photos here). It was beautiful, with sawtooth peaks surrounding us and a crystal clear mountain lake below us rimmed in granite – there really is nothing like this that I’ve ever seen. The wildlife was incredibly tame, or at least it seemed that way because we had deer walking through our camp and a marmot who had no problem chomping on a tree only feet away from us. We must have been huffing too much deet, because I came up with an LOLcats reference for the marmot that had the group in stitches. Unfortunately, the mosquitoes managed to break our spirits and eventually drove us back down the trail, retreating to a lower elevation. Without further ado, starting a new internet revolution, I’m going to post the first lolmarmots picture. Comedy gold.
P.S. Stay tuned for a video of the hiking trip… that is if I get really ambitious and put one together. That also means I’ll have to learn how to use some type of linux video editing package. Any suggestions?
Many updates to the gallery this week! Yup – quite a backlog of updates.
I’ve got pictures from our trip to Oregon for my grandmother’s funeral where we got a chance to play in the snow. We visited Silver Falls State Park, had some tall mugs of hot chocolate and skated around on the slick walking paths.
I also added pictures from both my trip to Taipei, Taiwan and Beijing, China. There’s lots of stories to go along with those photos. Perhaps for another time though.
Lastly, I’ve added some pictures of the USA vs. Mexico friendly (USA wins 2:0) that I had the privilege of attending recently. Many thanks to the Mooney’s for hooking me up with tickets for this one. Steve and Ragan – you rule. Good to see the whole AZ crew from time to time.
So stop wasting time and clickety-click-click on to the gallery.
Yesterday was super-packed day of sight-seeing. Our team was made up three intrepid travelers. Michael, our most experienced Asian traveler, who has years of travel to Taiwan, China, Japan and elsewhere under his belt. He also has the added advantage of some formal training in Chinese – he can read characters when necessary and has a pretty good understanding of the culture. Lelia is full of energy, and eager to see everything that this place has to offer. She was our driving force throughout the day – soldiering on when the rest of us would have been happy resting our road-weary bodies back at the hotel.
We started the day, on a mission. Michael’s wife had given him instructions, in Chinese, to go to a particular craft store and purchase components for making jewelry. Having had a full breakfast (including some dim sum) at the hotel, Lelia and I joined Michael in his quest. Because we had a specific address to go to, we thought it would be best to take a cab and have the cab driver direct us there. Unfortunately, after the short cab ride, we discovered the craft store was closed. Michael had to abort the mission and our sight seeing tour began.
We took another short ride in a cab to the Chiang Kei Shek memorial. We had intended to actually go to the Taiwan Handicrafts market, a government run store with many local souvenirs. However, our communication must not have been that good, because we ended up at the memorial instead. Since we had planned to see this anyway – we just went with the flow. This place is always impressive and on this day it did not let us down. The weather was beautiful and the gigantic memorial buildings, ornate and clean were breathtaking. While Michael rested in the middle of the square, Lelia and I went up the many steps of the main memorial building. Inside we spent a few moments admiring the statue inside. After a few moments, we descended the memorial steps and walked through the building’s ground floor. Most of the museum inside was going through renovation, so it was a short trip through. The gardens just outside the memorial were beautiful, so we decided to cut through them, taking pictures, on our way back to the square to meet Michael.
Since we were just a few blocks away from the handicraft market, we decided to just walk. Cabs, while cheap, were starting to be a bit much – especially with the communication gap. We spent at least an hour wandering around the market looking at all types of souvenir type things. Everything from souvenir spoons to traditional parchment with Chinese calligraphy. It’s a great place to get something to take home, but most of the items here are very overpriced, and can be found at the night market for much cheaper. I opted out of buying anything here for the time being.
From the market, we decided that we would try to go see the “old-town” area in Denshui. The concierge at the hotel told us it would be a 45 minute train ride north to the end of the line. I was a little apprehensive of doing this, since it was an unknown area for me, but it was a day for adventure. So we headed to the train station, which at this point was the subway. We purchased our tickets fairly easily and boarded the train. We shortly realized that we had boarded the train in the right direction, but this particular train was to diverge on another branch of the subway, so we got off this train and caught the next train to Denshui. The train whisked us away, and after what seemed like an eternity, we arrived at Denshui station.
At this point, we were basically winging it. None of us knew where we were and what we were going to go do. We looked around for some tourist maps, but couldn’t find anything. So, we simply started observing where the crowds of people were going – and we followed them. They led us into the narrow streets packed with shops and vendors of all types. It was not unlike the night markets that I had seen before, except it was operating during the day. Clothes, sunglasses, food, all at rock-bottom prices. It’s the cheap kind of stuff you’d expect to see, but it never ceases to amaze me just how cheap. Jeans for $3 (if you can find a pair that fits you), shirts for even less. All kinds of hilarious engrish examples are printed on the shirts. Lelia purchased a sweatshirt, which she particularly found funny, with a “blue-monkey” printed on the front, who wasn’t actually blue at all. Michael picked up some aviator sunglasses for $6, not a bad purchase.
We veered off of the initial street and found ourselves walking down an even more narrow alley, covered, but with many street vendors selling their fish, meats, clothes and gadgets. The crowd was even more dense in this small alley and to make matters worse, there were scooters navigating through the crowds of people. This isn’t the kind of place that you want to have social anxiety. Finally we found ourselves back on a main street where we decided to catch a cab to the wharf (local fisherman’s wharf which is a tourist trap similar to the San Francisco version). Once again, the cab ride was a short and fruitless journey. There was some kind of miscommunication, and we were dropped off in front of an old Spanish fort. It was certainly a tourist destination, but not the one we had in mind. We managed to find an information booth where we were instructed to catch bus number 26, which would take us to the wharf.
The wharf was beautiful. Unlike our other experiences in Taipei, the wharf is set on wide open spaces of green grass which opens up into the sea. The rest of the city is so dense with people, buildings, traffic that it’s a rarity to see such wide open space. It was a breath of fresh air. The wharf consisted of a long boardwalk with tourist shops, restaurants and boat rides. What’s so unique about this wharf is the bridge to get to the boardwalk, which is a massive cantilever footbridge. It’s a beautifully designed bridge, with one giant slanted tower which strings cables across the length of it for support. The pictures cannot do it justice.
We were all growing weary of walking around, so we found the bus which took us all the way back to the train station and finally took the train all the way back to the hotel. We returned to our rooms for a short while to recoup, change clothes and head out to dinner. While I had planned to take the crew to Japanese food, we learned that the restaurant I was looking for was now gone. Instead we ate at a very locally appropriate dumpling restaurant. It was excellent. Both the dumplings and the beef noodle soup were outstanding. This was by far the best culinary experience I have ever had in Taiwan. Yum.
After dinner, Michael had enough of walking around for the day and decided to call it a night. Lelia and I still had a little energy left for the night market. So we took the train once again out to the infamous snake alley. Before actually entering snake alley, we stopped at the Longshan Temple and watched as people lit incense and prayed. It’s a fascinating experience, and I sometimes wonder if the people there were offended having foreigners watch them while they did this. I felt like I was intruding upon them. I tried to snap a few stealthy pictures without being too obtrusive.
Finally, we ended the evening with a leisurely stroll through the night market. It was unusually quiet at the market on a Sunday night, but the same usual shops and displays were there. We stopped for a moment to watch the cobra’s open their hoods and strike at their master in futility. They were to be killed and drained of their blood for the waiting market goers. I wasn’t much in the mood to see this, so we kept walking. Lelia stopped and had scroll made for her mother. In my opinion, this is one of the more interesting tourist souvenirs. As far as we know, they could be writing anything on those scrolls, but they sure look pretty.
I suspect there won’t be many more stories this week. We’re going to be hard at work most of the rest of the time so there won’t be time write about it. I’m hoping to post more from Beijing in a few days!
As I write this I am on a plane to Taipei, Taiwan. It’s early in the journey, but we’re making a quick stop in Japan where we’ll deplane for a little while and then get back on board for the final push to Taipei. This is not my first trip to Taiwan, not by a wide margin, however this will be my first trip to Beijing, China which I am supremely excited about. I’m one of the lucky few who’s job affords me the opportunity to travel to far away places. At least I count myself as being pretty darn lucky.
Before the trip, I purchased these Philips Noise Cancelling ear-buds. It’s been a while since I have tried the over-the-ear type headphones, but I’d say these babies stack up quite nicely. If you’re on a plane for over 12 hours at a time, this technology is a god-send. The constant loud drone of the jet-engines easily overwhelms standard earbuds, like the ones that come with the iPod. I have also read articles about the affect of the ambient noise and plane travel – the gist being that the excessive sustained noise actually saps your overall energy at a much more rapid pace than say car travel does. Interesting theory – so to counter that I’m trying this active noise cancelling technology. So far, they seem to be excellent. I can still hear the low rumble of the engines, but it’s great reduced than without any noise cancellation.
Until next time.