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