After Tiger we headed down to a bar/club called The Pig Pen. We had a fun time, but unfortunately not of my pictures came out. I did get some video of an entertaining dance/singing crew they had. It was pretty funny, and me and Tyler were laughing the whole time. They would sing and dance to top 40 songs. I took this video with my camera phone and considering it can't even take pictures at the bar, I think the video came out pretty well.
!Warning! When you watch the video, turn the volume down on your computer.
We were out pretty late Sunday night and by the time we got back to the hotel we were pretty hungry. Where else is there to go for breakfast in Taiwan but good ol' McDonalds. After a feast of hot cakes and mc muffins, we meandered around a bit before heading back to the hotel. On the way back, we came across a bird in the river that we were enthralled with for a good ten minutes. He was just standing there waiting for food to come by. Nothing came.
We woke up relatively early, considering what time we went to bed, and went to get some coffee. We brought along the Lonely Planet, to find some cool things to do. Lonely Planet is pretty sparse for Taiwan but we did find a paragraph about a nature area outside of the city called Da Keng so we decided we would go check that out.
We boarded the busand paid our fare but unfortunately, we weren't sure where to get off, and we missed our stop. Now this wouldn't normally be such a big deal, but, as we found out a bit later, Da Keng is at the base of the mountains...like, the last stop before the bus goes up a big mountain. Needless to say, we didn't realize we missed our stop until after we had reached the top of the mountain. Now, we weren't on a mountain peak but more of a a broad plateau of farm country.
When we tried to get off the bus, the bus driver tried to get us to pay more money. This really angered me. I told the bus driver he knew where we were supposed to be going and didn't even bother telling us. We're foreigners and don't know the area, and that we weren't going to pay any more money. He mumbled something about not knowing where we were going, and I shot back "then how do you know we didn't pay the right fare" and walked off the bus.
We were 1 kilometer oustide of some small town. The town itself was perched on the edge of the mountain, giving us spectacular views of the mountain valley. We walked around a bit, being our first time in a truly small Taiwanese farming town. As you can guess, we weren't entertained long. We then went to the bus stop to wait for the bus...which never came. We waited for more than 30 minutes before we decided to pay the NT$300 (about $8) for a taxi down the mountain.
Once we got to the bottom of the mountain, we walked found the hiking area and walked around a bit. It was scenic but the views were much better on the top of the mountain. What was interesting was a little oasis in the middle of this dirty suburb called "Bee Museum No. 2". Intrigued by this strange English in the midst of Chinese, we decided to take a chance and went in. What we found was not a museum, but a themed cafe/gift shop...place. Lot's of green and bee cutouts, with a small restaurant. You would assume the gift shop would sell bee related items, but no, they sold 3D architecture puzzles...strange indeed.
So that was the trip. I had a blast. I really enjoy going to Taichung, maybe some day I'll move down there. I took a lot of really interesting pictures, so go to my Picassa page and just look for the Taichung folder.
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