If at first you don't succeed, tai tai Taiwanese.

One month down in Taiwan... the adventure continues.

On Saturday night, we were just walking down the road to find something to eat, and we stumbled upon this big stage set up in a parking lot. They were playing hypnotic taiwanese music which lured us to go and sit down. It seemed to be a free show from the mayor (or candidate) of jhubei. It was pretty cool, but without any english, me and tim couldn't really follow the story.

On Saturday, we headed for the west coast in search of a beach to swim at. We are only about 30 min scooter ride from the sea. After stopping at quite a few places, we didn't really find any decent place to swim in the sea, but we end up swimming at an big indoor swimming pool which was nice and refreshing.

It has still been bliksim hot here with daytime temps about 35C and night time temps about 27C, but it has started to cool down some days to a nice hot temp. With so much heat, cold drinks sell like hot cakes, but ice teas/juices/flavored milk are a lot more common then fizzy drinks, and there are plenty chain shops, that just sell ice tea and drinks (like"Yes Tea", "Drink Tea", "Coco"...). The above drink is called a "Bubble/Pearl milk tea". Its a refreshing milk tea with slimy jelly balls in it. They are fairly tasteless but fun. You get a big straw with the drink, so that you can suck them up.

This is the view from our apartment window!

Nice, but its a little deceiving. This is the right half of the view (and this is very fancy complex next door). The left half is just this big wall of the building. And the whole view is through a metal fence (where you hang your clothes inside and stuff).

We actually chose a very humble and super cheap place to stay, with one big room, and a bathroom. (No kitchen). We thought we would rather spend monthly rental money on fun taiwan weekend trips. We will show some photos of the house in a month or too when we have made it a bit more of a home (for now, we really only have the essentials).

Margarine/Butter in a tin? outside the fridge? yeah...

Viva le Taiwan!

Papparazzi

We recently got a burgundy two-seater couch for our apartment, because it didn't come with any furniture. It came with a 2 single beds, a wardrobe, a desk and plastic chair, a fridge, a TV (with cable tv, so about 100 channels! but only 4 english movie channels and CNN:), a small cupboard, free internet (no data cap)... so we needed somewhere to sit.

We went snooping around in the basement of Holland village (where Robyn, Hanna, Kelly, and Anna-lou stay) in that big trash/recycling area (see photo on previous blog post) because often people throw away pretty good stuff. To our surprise, we found a nice set of couches sitting there.

Now the 1st problem, was to get the couch out of Holland village without looking suspicious, and 2nd, to get the couch to our apartment 5km away cheaply, without a car, or bakkie in our possession, and 3rd - the language problem.

We thought about possibly carrying it, but didn't think we would get past security. So, instead I got a letter in Chinese from one of the teachers at work, to give to the HV complex rubbish man, so that he could hopefully deliver it with his truck (at a good price). I found the guy the next day, and arranged the plan for the following day, but at the arranged time of 3pm, we went to Holland village, while he was delivering the couch to our apartment (so nobody was home). Anyways, we eventually got the couch a few days later, and the comfort worth the trouble! If only all your furniture had a story to it :)

Oh, you are gonna luv this! No really, it's flipping hilarious. Our best video so far.

It's our bad ass beasts of transportation. We named the one scooter "Whoopi" after Mrs Goldberg cracked us up when we were watching the movie "Ghost" recently, and the other scooter is called "My BuBu" which is pretty ironic.

Cheerio, miss u guys, cliff and tim.