east of omaha

My roommates and I don't travel a whole lot—we have a ton of responsibilities in Taichung, like jobs and schoolwork and nearly everybody we know in Taiwan lives in the city, so we don't get a ton of chances to leave it. This weekend all that changed. Well okay not really, we just had spring break and unlike a lot of the exchange students, who saw this as a chance to spend a week and a half wandering the country, we were excited for the chance at a block of two whole days in which we all could get out of town. Well, us and our friends K. and F.

So we went to Kending! Kending is a national park and a popular tourist spot located at the very south of Taiwan. Okay, in all honesty I spent a lot of the trip extremely unhappy. I had anxiety issues galore and I hate how I look recently, which was exacerbated from the regular "mild life irritation" to "mild psychological torment" by my friends literally taking hundreds of photos over the course of the trip while talking constantly about clothes and makeup and spending significant amounts of time braiding each other's hair.

But otherwise! We went to the beach and we saw this lighthouse that the Japanese and Americans made the Taiwanese build (I guess they were sick of their boats crashing into the rocks) and we went to the aquarium and saw many bizarre creatures. I learned that sting rays have terrible flattened faces if you look at then from underneath, and I bought this kid's Oxford Encyclopedia—basically this but in Chinese—which I carried with me throughout the rest of the trip to read. I can understand it!

On the way back we got stuck in Gaoxiong for about four hours, so we took the MRT and hit two night markets in the city, including the apparently well known Liuhe night market. It's famous for food! Which I did not really eat, but we did get these rolls that had garlic and butter inside them, they were pretty good. I really like Gaoxiong, I wish I could spend more time there.

And then we were home! Where I proceeded to sleep for like, the next two days straight, because I am a useful person and the world is lucky to have me.

As you can see I've totally given up on Taiwan's romanization. Pinyin, man, I swear it won't kill you guys.