Water Parks are for Short People

and by this I'm not saying anything about Taiwanese people. I mean the water park was made for people under 4 feet to swim in. But more on that later. First, last night's dinner was a random choice near the night market. My choice: rice and junk. Junk being several vegetables and some pork. It was decent.

Gading's Chicken looked better than my pork, but it was too late to change my order...

 After dinner, Andrew wanted to try and get a swimming suit, so we started wandering down the Night Market in search of swim trunks.

Notice the people, cars and scooters all in the same lanes...

Just enjoy it and have fun...

Well, we had no luck until a shop keeper wrote down the name of a place and pointed down a larger street. That led us to, not a shop, but an indoor pool with a pro shop.

Dragons guarding the gate...

 He had no luck, as they pretty much just had Speedo's, and that wasn't really what he was going for..It DID have:

Did this seriously get past the editors?

So, we headed home in preparation for the long day on Saturday, which included an historic town recreation and a water park. I haven't been to a water park in over twenty years...kinda by choice. You can't swim, you stand in line and there's a million kids. Anyway, I was certainly open to experiencing it here in Taiwan.

We headed out in the morning on time for the first time this trip. It was bright, bright sunshine and a high of 95 in the forecast, so perfect for a water park, right?

That is a tow truck. That is what we saw twenty minutes after we left. That wasn't an accident. You see, our bus broke down. It was just a clogged oil filter, but pulling over on the highway in Taiwan is a dangerous thing to do. As you can see from the picture, the shoulder is not wide enough for a bus, so we were stopped IN TRAFFIC on the expressway while they worked on the bus. Hence the tow truck in front (which has a siren just like the police vehicles) and a police car behind us while they worked quickly to fix the filter. Back on the road 20 minutes later only to pull over again. The driver forgot to bleed the air out of the hoses....So we limped along a bit more until we reached a rest stop where he could safely finish the job. By the time we reached the first destination, we had 40 minutes left the explore it, get lunch and get back on the bus.

The next destination was an odd recreation of an historic town, similar to what Disney does with the downtown area of Magic Kingdom. There were shows and characters in costume and shops, but we a) didn't have enough time to see them, b) didn't understand what was going on, and c) didn't realize a large part was under construction until we walked into it...

A girl with a fish on her head? She shows up later...

I think we made a wrong turn at Albuquerque...

The people we saw dressed up for the shows were in elaborate costumes, and stayed in character well, posing with people for pictures before leading them to...somewhere. We didn't have time to follow.

Double-click on the picture to see it full-size

The small part of a show that we did see was quite nice, though definitely for children. We gathered it was under the sea, aaaaand that's about it. None of the Taiwan students we saw ventured anywhere past the food, so we couldn't ask them.

A starfish and a seahorse...and the girl with the fish on her head

By now, we had about twenty minutes to eat and get back to the bus, so we headed to the "food court" area and found a bunch of bad looking Taiwanese fast food (think different versions on Panda Hut). So, we settled on an odd, pseudo-western place, more out of a lack of other options, and because the combinations were pretty amusing. We also had an interesting dining partner.

One order of kibbles, well done, please

Lunch Set #4:Bagel, eggs, a hot dog, french fries and clam chowder?

So, I asked for tea, not soup and the "hot dog" was made of lamb, even though the "tsu" (Chinese word for kanji, it literally means "word") clearly said beef. The worst dining experience this trip. Even worse than the seafood restaurant, which got a "not good". I was that harsh on it even though the fries, egg and bagel weren't bad (they are hard to screw up). But the lamb dog was unexpected and just awful and the soup was unwanted, and I had neither time nor linguistic skill to get tea. Again, I did have the foresight to stop at 7-11 on the way out, so I had a croissant and some potato chips in my bag for just such an occasion.

So, we quickly loaded up the bus and headed out to the water park. It was....a water park

Erik and Bree had fun

Bree tries out a water massage chair

See the little girl behind Erik? As soon as they got up, she shot them both with her water gun!

I did a lot of soaking (without a camera) at the deepest part of the pool (about 3 feet). During this time, I was approached several times by kids and teenagers. They all would say "Haroo", and when I would respond, they would giggle and run away :) One young boy then asked me something in Chinese. I shook my head and said "Bou Hue", which roughly means "don't speak". He looked very surprised, but then smiled and nodded....and shot me with his water gun. I was unarmed and defenseless...

That, by the way, is apparently great sport in Taiwanese water parks. For parents, too. This one little girl stared at me for several minutes before finally working up the courage to shoot me. She then got a huge grin on her face....and ran away as fast as she could.

By the end of the day, we were all very hot. I was smart enough to have been applying sunscreen all day, so I escaped any burning. Several other blond haired people were not as smart, nor as lucky. When we got back to the dorms, it was about 8PM. There was a jazz club that several students had gone to earlier in the week that we wanted to check out, so we cleaned up and headed over to ALT

Boy are Stupid

The bar was about the size of our living room. The owner was very nice, spoke decent English and the place was really relaxed and cozy. There's no smoking in most Taiwanese places, and this was no exception. The food (mostly appetizers) was good and, though a little expensive for here (normal prices in the US) a pleasant place to wind down and spend a few hours....before our 11PM curfew. There was, sadly, no music tonight, but next Saturday is their 2nd or 3rd anniversary, and they are going to have a party with, of all things, a western classic rock band. I might have to check it out :)