Taiwan has dogs and monkeys

February 3, 2012. Written in Taipei, Taiwan.

Taiwan has dogs and monkeys.

The second day of my stay in Kaoshung at Wendy's family (a girl that works as the staff in the hostel I stayed in Taipei), me and Raphael woke up at around 12:00. Some of you might already have had his introduction in Japanese or Dutch, but for those of you that can only understand English; Raphael is an intelligent French guy with glasses that speaks fluent Japanese.

 
The day started with a huge lunch (brunch?) created by Wendy's mom. Without knowing so (I only learned later), we were eating all sorts of dishes that are eaten specially because of the Chinese new year. Much like in Japan, all these foods have a different meaning. For example, there is a huge fried fish of which you are supposed to eat only a little. If you eat it all, it is said that there is no food left for the rest of the year. Why by all means this has to be a fish I don't know, but then again why not a fish?

With the whole family, we went into the mountains by car. Wendy's family is a very warm and happy one, and while making all sorts of jokes we enjoyed the nice scenery. For example, in Chinese there is this saying called "Taiwan has water and mountains" which seemed quite appropriate because that was exactly what the scenery was all about. But on the way, I saw many wild dogs and monkey's, so I decided to change the saying into "Taiwan has dogs and monkeys", which I was just able to do with my limited Chinese skills.

At the top (or nearly the top) of the mountain, we headed into a coffee shop from which you could look out at the beautiful sea.

Due to the Chinese new year (this being new year's eve!) it was pretty crowded, but not as much as I had expected. We ordered some coffee and cake. A huge espresso was served with the writtings　「新年 (new year)  happy」. As if it was alcohol, this espresso was poured to each other, and whenever the cup was empty it would be filled again.

We spent the second half of the day at a small touristic town located at the sea.

You go there by taking the local ferry. On the ferry, there was a tall South-Asian looking guy standing out.
"Nihao!" I said to him. He seemed very friendly and enthousiastically started a conversation with me. He was from Singapore and had come here with his Japanese wife for holidays. Now, that was a coincidence. He introduced me to his wife and I talked with her some about Taiwan being such a friendly country towards Japanese. She told me that she found that Kaoshung looked similar to her hometown in Aomori in many ways.

The beach is located at the end of the town. While waiting for the sunset, we took some sexy pictures, although Wendy and I were the only ones that were trying to look sexy. Where did you acting skills go Raphael and Didi!?