DAY 3

Day 3 was the day of the expensive complimentary tour.
SGD 15/pax of mandatory tips. It's actually alright if the tour guide does a great job but he...

1) Advertised for the commercialised areas that he's gonna bring us to on the bus instead of introducing landmarks.

2) Allowed us to spend only 5-30min on places of interest so that we can spend a longer time at the commercialised areas.

3) Pressured us to buy the goods at the commercialised places he brought us to.

3) Blatantly criticised those who did not buy or did not buy as much as he expected them to buy.

So it's quite a bad idea to spend $15 on a money minded tour guide.

ANYWAY,

At the memorial hall,



Behind us are 2 sets of white stairs, each with 89 steps that represented Chiang Kai Shek's age at his age of death.

The place was actually called 中正公园 but dear Mr Chen Sui Bian, having as many patterns as ever, decided to ban the use of "中正" (named after Chiang Kai Shek) and renamed it the 国立台湾民主纪念馆. The airport which was initially called the 中正国际机场 was subsequently renamed as the Taopei, Taoyuan Airport by the same dear man mentioned.

If i didn't remember wrongly, it's cause Chiang and Chen has different ideologies so the latter decided to do something so extreme.


Anyway, I'm going to say something that I've repeated in the past 2 entries and that is the weather is really super damn very extremely hot! Shot above 36 degree cel!


It's a famous scenic location where you can find landforms as a result of wave erosion, weathering and the act of earth's crust. And those processed created fantastic rock formations like the ginger heads above! And the park is famous for the Queen's head, Candlesticks and Fairy's shoe.

Since my parents are anti shopping, the main itinerary for the trip was sight seeing. So our first destination for day 2 was to the 陽明山. It is 1 of the seven national parks in Taiwan and you can see volcanoes, hot springs, gardens etc.

The sight is spectacular but the weather is damn bad. It is about 36 degree celcius on ground level but as we go up the mountain, it started drizzling periodically so we were kept busy just from opening and keeping our umbrellas. And it just so happened that we met with a typhoon and my umbrella had a bad sprain and died eventually.





Went to 冷水坑 which contains Taiwan's sole bed of precipitated sulfur for the foot spring and public bath but it was closed for cleaning and the foot spring has dried up! :( Our plans were to explore the different stops at 陽明山 like the 擎天崗 which is an undulating grassland surrounded on all sides by mountain peaks but the weather is so bad that we got to abort the plan.



So we went down the mountain then once again, we were nearly roasted to our death once we reached ground level. You really can't imagine the great transition. We then headed to






The place is well known by its beautiful sunset so how can we miss it. Walked around while waiting for the sun to set and we got ourselves the long long icecream! But it's not a good idea to eat it there at all cause the wind's surely causing the icecream to melt at an incredible speed.



witnessed the beautiful sunset, left the place and headed for 淡水老街, another night market. Not very interesting, almost all the stores are selling the iron eggs and roasted cuttlefish.

Then we realised many shops are selling "阿給" too. And we were very curious what exactly that is! Never see before, never hear before, never smell before.

So we asked around and realised that it's what 淡水 is famous for. So obviously that sent us walking towards one out of the many many shops selling 阿給 and decided to give it a try.

The 2 extra slots of lessons on Mon crept into the database and into my timetable secretly while I was asleep.

Now I rather travel 3 hours for the 1 hour lesson rather than waiting 5 hours for th next lesson!

11 hours lost just on the first 2 days of school. Damn gay.

I am so traumatized that I got to post this.

CAUSE I GOT A CRAP TIMETABLE THAT'S GOING TO STAY WITH ME FOR GOD-KNOWS-HOW-LONG!

I got to travel for 3 hours to attend a ONE HOUR lesson on Mon.
I've a straight 6 hour in-between break on Tues which I've no idea how to survive through.
I've 7 lessons on Thurs and 6 of them are straight after the other.

Blur block to the max. And luckily I was stopped before I really execute the plan else I would feel really sore to be greeted by locked gates instead of a surprised girl!

That explains why I've to 'recycle' the birthday picture hahaha. I'm really pathetic.

But she was a busy pie so we only met up on the 9th & went to lalala.

& I feel really really pathetic at this point of time to 'recycle' the second piece of bday photo! Cause I didn't manage to capture a decent smiling picture :(