Tea Tour, Day the First

In the spirit of not infringing on Alleah's territory of frickin' long posts, I guess I'll break this all up, if I can figure it out. In the spirit of randomness, read all about instances of the exploding whale--in North America & Taiwan.

Anyway, this is about the Tea Tour, which we capitalize. It's one of two tours that Rotary offers for Inbound exchange students in Taiwan (for a total of 8 vacation days... in some South American countries you get 5 weeks) & involves busing down to the center of the island and looking at farms. Also, as for the shameful typo in my last post, I apologize profusely to the French language; however, I am pleased that I make so few that they glare & my loyal readership corrects them. Also, before we begin, I found another variant on 'awesemnity,' being "awesomnessity."

Friday

Scott & I went to the Zhongxiao Fuxing MRT station to meet up with everyone at about 6:15 AM. We all got on the bus and it started driving south. For the most part the ride was enjoyable. We stopped after about an hour for a 10-minute rest stop in which to pick up some more exchange students. It's here that the unimaginable, every hacker's nightmare, happened.

Now, let it first be said about Fabio that he's generally a good guy. I didn't think anything of his history of kicking things up in the air very high when I allowed him to join the impromptu hack session, only the all-accepting principle of the circle. But soon, Fabio had the hack, and American Alex declared, "He's going to kick it on the roof." How right he was, and soon the parabolic arc we know and love ended abruptly several stories up on the roof of the rest stop. At this point, there might have been an "oh, shit" from one of the others, but I was silent, my recently unleashed joy twisted into sadness.

We continued on the bus with some of the down-island people such as Catherine (possibly my favourite Canadienne), Ada, & some randomly young girl who has really good Chinese. Somewhere in here, the bad karaoke begun. While I am not, on principal, against karaoke, I personally strongly dislike bad karaoke. And somehow, only a few annoying people who could NOT sing at all kept doing song after song, and saying random things into the mic. It should also be noted that whenever there is a microphone, French Alex can be found broadcasting inanity with it. Scott was of course crushed as he dislikes music in general & really bad music in particular.

In reality quite soon (though a relative eternity) we arrived in Shuili (水里) which is pretty much the middle of Taiwan & next to "Sun Moon Lake." We all met the county mayor and hung out in his office. This is where I decide to post pictures, though I took a lot, because there is one of Yoshiteru I quite enjoy:

I'd like to say a few words about Yoshiteru at this point... he's one of the Japanese exchange students, but unlike Kenta he pwns (owns or dominates completely) at one thing alone: badminton. Thus, I've taken to calling him Yoshiteru-hiko, because as there is a Prince of Tennis, there is likewise one for badminton.

There was free food on the bus, so I took a can of pringles into the instructional video at the hydroelectric dam we visited. It's interesting because there, at night when power usage is low, excess electricity is used to pump water back UP into a reservoir, kind of like a battery of gravitational potential energy. I found it quite interesting.

Subsequently, we found ourselves at a hot spring bath. I have no pictures of this because, of course, water + camera = death. At this hot spring, not only do you wear clothes, but the guys & girls are segregated ... you can't even see the girls in their skimpy western bathing suits (the girls' ones in PE had like skirt parts at the bottom so you don't see the bikini line). So it was very random, and the water was also RIDICULOUSLY hot.

Somewhere in there, guys (starting with Fabio & ending with all of us) began climbing the wall to look at/talk to the girls. Later on, Anna climbed the wall to look at us, and she found herself mooned by the vast majority of the males in her sight (some old Chinese guys were in the steam room & did not participate)! Later on, Wil--being finished bathing of course--threw his bathing suit over the wall. After a few screams & girls looking over the wall, some bikinis followed. A few guys put them on and climed the wall, then ripped them off, to my great amusement. But enough of that.

We had dinner outdoors, mmm... pasta, and then headed to our various host families... I was with the other Wanfangers (if such a word existed before) which I considered slightly unfortunate, as Alex & Ivan are a troublesome duo. We went to this grove and did karaoke for a while, then hung out at the house. I played ball with some little Taiwanese kids and talked to some people, a woman whose English was only slightly better than my Chinese & a guy whose was worse. They had a really cute little 10-month-old who unfortunately didn't like me. Taught Kenta the words to "Country Roads." My slippers were WAY too small at first, but sometime after Ivan & Alex tried to play cards/gamble with us I got bigger ones. Here's Kenta abed in a room similar to mine. Hooray for sleeping on the floor...

Thus concludes day the first.