Sunday, May 10th

Today was such a great day! Logan, Clark, and Amanda joined us as we took a private bus to Fulong Beach and stopped at an old mining town on top of a mountain called Jiufen. It was like a few hours bus ride so we sang lots of karaoke on the way...my favorite was definitely Dr. Fox "singing" Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way"...wow...he's actually pretty darn good at improv..."I chewed it up, what?!, and spit it out?"...yeah, and Charles and I sang a ton...Charles is hilarious with karaoke because he like has this great tv announcer sing-talk voice.

Before the hike up the tiny little narrow stairs from the parking lot to Jiufen, we took some pictures overlooking the mountains and ocean...and waved like crazy at passersby who seemed to enjoy seeing crazy Americans. We got to wander around in the markets up on top of the mountain in the little village. Megan and I thought we were the last ones since we were running late to meet up with the bus so we ran down the entire way, stairs and all. Charles ended up being the last one and returned just as we were sending out a search party for him.

We loaded up the bus and drove for probably another hour before we got to the beach area where Charlie handed out Chinese lunchboxes from a local restaurant. These were...different...I kinda liked the vegetarian one...it had random tofu and tvp pieces, seaweeds, rice, a tea-boiled egg, and who knows what else. I think Sally or Angela found a fly in theirs though, so that was pretty gross.

After lunch, some of the group went on a bike ride, but the rest of us headed out to the beach and laid claim to our hot piece of sand-land. Megan and I were invited by some local Taiwanese guys to play some volleyball with them...we all sucked so I didn't feel too bad. Charles and Trey joined us about halfway through and Charles kept spiking it way out of the court. Every time the Taiwanese guys wanted me to serve, I couldn't get it over the net, because I've definitely never played volleyball.

When Megan and I decided to finally get in the water, everyone else was being a big chicken and thought it was too cold. We warmed up by "jumping waves" aka every time a wave came we tried to jump over it and basically got taken under and got wet pretty fast...so really there was no time to be cold because of all the fun we were having jumping and singing random songs. Charles, Emily, Haneul, James, and Danny joined us for a bit. Oh, and all these locals kept getting closer and closer to us in the water...I think we were pretty entertaining to them what with us making a racket singing and splashing.

On the bus ride back we sang karaoke, and Dr. Fox complained about certain people's singing abilities...many people passed out on the long ride back. At a bathroom break we got our first taste of the stupid hole-in-the-ground Asian toilets...the girls bathroom only had one working (if you can call it that) stall...so while we were trying to use the stupid trough, the tank above us kept leaking (more like pouring) water on our heads...disgusting...

Later that evening Crock and Rogan and Amanda took us to this Japanese restaurant where we pointed to pictures again on the menu and ordered fun drinks. I ended up with some kind of cheesy seafood pasta/rice dish but it was pretty good. We were in the middle of some kind of big shopping area and we wandered around for a few minutes while we waited for our table.

After dinner, Charlie and Crark and Rogan and their friend Kyle took us to a little bar called 45...awesome...Charles basically kept falling asleep next to me in the booth...Danny and I had to make sure Megan didn't fall over the railing since we were upstairs after she did her Thriller dance for everyone...pretty funny...Charlie had to help Haneul down the stairs I heard...I think that was it for Sunday.