Birds prohibited.

Hi all,

Hope you're doing well this evening / morning.

It's been quite the vacation - I've done quite a bit of travelling around the potato on a stick shaped land of Taiwan.

I can't believe my time here is almost over. It's Thursday night here - Just one day left before I head for home on Saturday early morning.

I know it's been a while since I've written - but I'm pretty tired, but I will go as far as I can...

So where did I leave you last?

Saturday morning we left at 5 a.m. to catch the super early train to Kaohsiung where we visited some family and had lunch at a swanky hotel restaurant that had a serious gold fetish. Almost everything was either gold, gold plated, or trimmed in gold.

A little much if you ask me, but hey, what do I know what swanky hotelgoers like?

I'm sure the goldness had something to do with prosperity or something like that. Anyway, this restaurant was on the 10th floor (I think) so the views of the cityscape were pretty nice. The food was pretty good as well.

After lunch we were headed on a journey into the mountains to one of the resort towns where there were hot springs. We took a train to a nearby city, and then rode a bus up the mountain. One thing that Taiwanese bus drivers need to have is major driving skillz. This guy was taking these super tight turns in this huge bus. Oh yeah, for extra bonus driver points, the bus was manual transmission - Which I'm sure was necessary for mountain climbing, but I'm just used to the buses back home where they're automatic.

Anyway, so we're going up the extremely twisty mountain in this bus - Dodging cars, people, and other various road hazards. From my view up top, it looked like we were going to hit stuff all of the time. But we never did.

(This mountain driving would end up being not so fun for me later)

So fast forward to the hot springs experience...

For those of you that aren't familiar with hot springs- I had heard about them (and avoided them) but my dad convinced me to go. Apparently there's different kinds. Like I've heard in Japan where it's just one big ol spa like atmosphere where everyone goes in and soaks in the hot springs water. And there's like minerals and stuff in this water that is supposed to be really great for your skin.

Well one thing was for sure, I wasn't going to do the public thing - No way. So my dad found a place where there's a tub in the bathroom and instead of hot water, it's replaced with this spigot that just outputs hot springs water.

(to be continued because I'm falling asleep)

-Kirk