Taiwan

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Today would take us to Nantou.  We opted for breakfast again at the hotel.  After breakfast Travis left to try and figure out how to get us to our destination for the day.  He seemed to be gone for quite a while.  Paul and I decided to venture out of the hotel over to the street market right next to our hotel.  Crowded does not even begin to describe the street.  There are people everywhere and scooters trying to also maneuver the street.  I knocked over a bicycle, and at first did not even realize what I had done.  Like I said, it was crowded.  When I realized what I had done, Paul and I picked up the bike and put all the stuff that had fallen out of the basket back in.  I apologized to the lady but I'm pretty sure she was making fun of me.  Whatever, we continued on our way.

Travis finally returned back to the hotel to tell us he had found a cab driver who would take us around all day.  The price seemed reasonable so we headed out. It was quite a long ride so before we got to where we wanted to go we stopped for lunch.  It was a small hole in the wall place.  Even Wade was able to find something he could eat there.  The on thing that I noticed the entire time we were in Taiwan was that a little food would fill you up.

We arrived at the city of Gingjing and the Evergreen Grasslands Farm.  It was such a nice temperature change.  It was in the mountains so it was much cooler.  I actually had to put my jacket on for the first time since arriving in Taiwan.  This farm consisted of Sheep, Goats and Horses.  It looked like a place you would see in the Swiss Alps.

Travis had food in his mouth so the sheep would kiss him, Yuck.

Baby Sheep

 This was a very nice relaxing day compared to the running of the days so far.  After spending time at the farm we headed back to Yuanlin.  Travis asked the Taxi driver if there were any good places to stop at on the way back.  He suggested we stop at the winery and do some wine testing.  We declined.  So, then he suggested we stop at the Beer Brewery Museum.  He was so excited about it that we said okay.  It was just that, a museum with the history of beer making.  We were not there very long.  We also found a drink store that made Sugar Cane drinks.  We opted for a couple of different kinds but they were all so sweet.  This surprised me that they have these drinks in Taiwan because nothing we had eaten or had to drink was sweet at all.  Travis said they do not like sweet things.   In fact, one place we stopped to get a smoothie type drink one day asked how much sugar we wanted in our drink.  Travis had told them the largest amount and it still was not sweet. 

After returning to Yuanlin, we met Ya Ting for dinner at an all you can eat hot pot restaurant.  Getting to the restaurant took us at least 45 minutes more than it should have.  We stopped by Casper's work to get directions to the restaurant.  That did not help much.  We even had Travis phone GPS and that seemed to make it worse.  We saw a lot of the side streets and our hotel twice before we ended up in the right direction and finding the restaurant.  It took us less then 10 minutes to get back to the hotel after dinner.  It was pretty much like the one we had eaten at before.  I found the meat to be very fatty and hard to eat.  The vegetables and other items were very good. They had soft drinks, which was very unusual, and also ice cream for dessert.  So, we had ice cream twice that night, once at the restaurant and once back at the hotel. When we tried to pay for dinner our VISA would not work.  They tried it a couple of times, so we figured we would have find out the next day what was going on with our VISA.  We paid with cash.