If I had a dollar, for everytime I heard that!

Hello all you whipper snappers

Hope you all had a great festive season. Our Christmas was quite different, but Kris Kringle still

found our humble house, and gave Cliff a pair of brown Corduroy pants, and a nifty little tripod that you attach onto any cold drink bottle lid, and he gave Tim a yellow "eggy" lamp.

This is a photo with one of Cliff's 13 classes that he teaches. They range from 2 to 14 students, and they are 6-13 years old.

See Cliff, singing a song with the kids.

We went into Taipei for new years eve, to watch the fireworks from Taipei 101 (now the 2nd tallest building in the world, since 4 Jan 2010). As you can see the metro (underground) was packed with BZ people getting there (above).

Over a million people gathered in the streets surrounding the building, to watch 22000 fireworks explode explode in 188 seconds (The most fireworks ever set off at one time).

They were amazing, but I was slightly disappointed because it was over so quickly, and there was no countdown. They should have spread the fireworks over 10 minutes, had more randomness, and worked up to a climax. But they were still awesome.

I put the video on YouTube because its 3 minutes long. Click here to watch it!

Cliff got a photo with some New year ninjas, while wearing his stylish raincoat (above).

We chatted to these ladies for a little while on New years eve. Now and again, we get random people that just want a photo with us. They don't want to chat... they just whip out the camera, and ask if they can take a photo with us. I keep meaning to pull a dog ugly face in the pics, but I always forget.

We couldn't book any accommodation in Taipei, because we left it too late, and everything was full. So after the clock struck twelve, we walked around for a while, and saw that the cinema was open throughout the night, so we tried to watch a movie (but all 3 good movies were sold out until the 4:30am show). So we went and got a metro (underground) ticket and rode the subway up and down on the line, catching forty winks.

Then we went to one of the Memorial halls at 6:00am to get red calligraphy scarfs and see the president of Taiwan (Ma Ying-jeou), but we went to the wrong memorial hall, and ended up at this random 3.7km run with all the old people, who insisted on helping us out (like this lady above, who pinned our numbers on our shirt for us). See a short clip of the run below.

As they say... What goes up, must come down. These boys were having a nice sleep outside MaccieD's, when we went there for new year breakfast.

We stayed in Taipei for three days, because 01 Jan was a holiday. While in Taipei, we went to see a "museum of miniatures". It was crazy how people had created these exact replicas of luxurious rooms. Those keys on the piano above, are smaller than a grain of rice.

The descriptions about each room, were just as entertaining, because the word order and vocab was a bit off, but the content was very imaginative. One of the descriptions said..."In America, it is quite popular that houses are built around a golf course, to form a community that attracts jealousy. If you are a golf lover, please feel free to heave a sigh before you turn to the next (room)."

While in Taipei, we also went to see the Chiang Kai Shek memorial, "Snake alley" (where you can drink some Snake blood and stuff like that), Longshan temple (which has a waterfall at it).

After being culture vultures, we went to see "Avatar" on the IMAX, and in 3D! So that was pretty awesome effects!

On Sunday, we went to Danshui, which is a smaller town (north of Taipei). We hired a tandem bicycle there, and rode along the coast. The tandem bicycle was flippin tricky to ride, because it was a lot less stable than normal, and steering was very sensitive. This caused a few little accidents, and some close calls (next to the water's edge), as you will see in the video below.

We also went to a bizarre little museum there, called "Believe it or not" with some strange reptiles, and rare deformations of animals (like 2 heads or 2 tails)...

... then we had a super tall ice cream. The end.

Cliff and Tim

Strawberries, boats and raindrops.

Over the Christmas weekend Cliff and I went on a weekend trip to the Sun Moon Lake. We both worked on Christmas eve and day, so I was super keen to do something fun over the weekend. We could have caught a train and a bus to get to the lake, we did the slightly more adventurous thing and scootered over there. It is about 160km - and in South Africa terms not very far. But on our little scooters bumbling along the windy country roads it was quite an adventure.

We stopped at a strawberry farm along the way and picked ourselves some berries. They have these cunning little pickin carts that the hard core pickers can use.

We had some fun times with the "Scooter Gangs" we encountered along the way. These guys are sweet! They pimp their rides, and often have matching gear to their steeds. Something the couples do here is have matching helmets and jackets - which sort of runs parallel to the matching weekend tracksuit phenomenon often sighted in East Rand Mall. In fact I sure that could be a thesis or something.

Anyway, we had the opportunity to 'ride with the boys' along the way as they passed us (at which point we latched on the back and just cruised the hills in out LAME rain gear) My favorite scooter I saw was painted like a sharks mouth at the back where the wheel/suspension/mud flap is, it had teeth and blood and everything.

This is a amazing highway interchange we saw along the way. The more I looked at it the crazier it seemed to me. The three highways join in this valley with a wide river basin, and they have just taken the whole road system and hung it in the air!

This picture and video were taken at a pagoda on the hills next to the Sun Moon lake. We couldn't go up the pagoda because it was "destroyed" by an earthquake. Seemed to us to be very much still there - but maybe just damaged and they don't want any tourists squashed if it decides to fall over.

You can see the lake in the back round behind Cliff. It was clear in the morning but always got hazy as the day got on.

Peace people: Taiwan style!

These are some floating flower beds. I think the idea for this actually comes from the native/aboriginal people who live on or near the lake. They make square bamboo rafts and float them on the lake with earth on top of them, and then they use them to grow food on. Its really clever because it also absorbs some of the wave energy and protects their floating homes. Its a weird concept to have floating fields...

This is a display of a traditional (or at least historical) dock with boats. They had these glowing lanterns to go along with it too.

This is a life saving device for the famed Sun Moon Lake creature. It has a sweet tooth for fruit loops (sugar coat cereal delicacy) and this is used to lure the creature to safety.

Looking happy and at peace with the world. It is such a good feeling going up and down a valley pass with winding roads on a two wheel vehicle - it is so different to being in a car. You get the wind and smells and sometimes tastes of the open roads that make it much more interesting experience.

However....

Shortly after this photo was taken it got much darker, colder and wetter.

And that is when the good warm fuzzy feeling vanished.

This is when being on two wheel is not AS much fun as being inside a comfy bubble of a car, and over two hours of driving in the cold dark wet night was the very graceful end to an exciting weekend.

We were short of some waterproof clothes, so Cliff used some rubbish bags! I could hear him flapping way back behind him on the road, but they seemed to do the trick. Not to mention adding to the overall style of his giddup.

We hired ourselves a little row boat and went to water, and the above is a little taste of our sea adventure. Thanks for reading - and I hope you all had a swell Christmas, and New Year!

Cheers, Tim