This day was a free day to explore on our own. A small group and I decided to take the gondola across the mountains and visit Maokong. It’s a little town known for having tea houses serving locally grown tea. After a mile walk to the subway, we hopped the train out to the gondola station. It’s part of the public transportation system, so it was really cheap. Of course, in Taiwan $US is about $30 New Taiwan Dollars, so everything is cheap. But for a little extra we got a ticket for a free ice cream at the top which was needed after the hot walks!
The gondola goes really high over several mountain peaks to get to the top, so it’s a nice ride up.
As you go you can see Taipei 101 over the city because it’s so tall. It’s fun to see it pop out around corners.
We went over several of the tea fields, they use terrace farming which is in the AP Human Geography curriculum, so that was fun to see in person. The tea was pretty small so I’m guessing it’s early in the season but I don’t know enough about tea growing to know for sure. The town was cute but pretty touristy overall.
We walked out of town to a tea house recommended by our tour guide and it was spectacular. We had a ton of tea (I think I drank about 15 tiny glasses, I was so thirsty from the walking), tea oil infused rice (the best of the whole trip so far), and lots of other dishes. Everything had tea oils or flavors so it was fun to try to taste it. We also saw a ton of cats, this one reminded me so much of Maddie when she was younger and it came right up and let me pet it.
Coming down we rode in a crystal bottom gondola car, that was interesting. I got a little car sick sitting backwards from too many things moving but once I switched I was ok. It was weird seeing the ground right under my feet! I think the best thing I bought for this trip was the fan around my neck. It blows air up to my face so it cools me off. I’m getting a heck of a weird tan line from it, but it’s so worth it to prevent overheating.
At the bottom we saw these cute signs so I had to take a fun picture. Shout out to my roommate Deirdre who is an awesome photographer and has taken a ton of fun shots of me. More to come later!
After a rest, a different group went to a baseball game. It was kind of like a college game but it’s the professional league, but also like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We saw and cheered for the home team, the Dragons, and their fans were so much fun. They have cheerleaders and the fans know their dances, there’s a whole drum section and band, and lots of fun activities. The weird thing to us was that they don’t stop anything for plays, they just keep dancing and playing. At one point there was a high fly ball to center, complete with drum roll until the catch and a celebration after it! So wild. We were right next to a camera and ended up on screen several times. It started raining hard in about the 5th, so some of us took after after having dinner (corn dogs and fries with sour cream…yum!). We grabbed pastries for the morning and headed back to NTNU by bus.
No comments:
Post a Comment