Our Trip to Maoli

More pictures from another trip with Paul and family. This time we went to Maoli. Historical sights and lots of wood carving. We visited the wood carving museum, and did some shopping and sightseeing. Enjoy the photos...

The train bridge that fell after an earthquake. The station is deserted now and is a big tourist attraction. Giant-ass wood carving are all abound at the museum. This elephant is as big as a car, and it's carved from a single piece of wood. Very cool. This was an early industry for Taiwan, with master carvers producing works for export to North America, Europe and Japan.

We ate at an amazing noodle house. The best places are always very unassuming, and Paul knows where they are. Now we have to get better at finding the best places. We ate at the most tranquil vegetarian restaurant in the mountains. It was amazing. We talked philosophy and politics late into the evening. This place is the sort of place you dream about...and $4000 ($150 CDN) a night for one of the cabins.

Like I said, this place was a dream. The food was great and the atmosphere was even better. I loved all the ducks around, and the setting in the mountains was just amazing. Paul tells us that its very difficult to find land in the mountains that also has such a supply of water. They have their own septic lake for the restaurant and all the cabins.

NEways, we had a great time, and ate some fantastic food.

Earthquake MkII

My internet hasn't been working since we got another earthquake. A 6.2 is never fun, even when it's a couple of hundred km away. So my internet's been messed.

Just if you were wondering...living in an apartment is kind of like living in a tent. No insulation, so if you heat the apartment (the heaters here are nothing but giant toasters), at night you get a lot of condensation when things cool down, and everything gets wet (like the inside of a tent). So you have to keep the windows open. Makes it even harder to heat....it's a losing battle.

IF you're interested, I'm teaching mostly online now. Notice all the women are first? That's Asia for you....

Earthquake

Fun. We had a boxing day earthquake today. Actually, we had 4. Two of them were rather serious, and had many of our clients worried and scared.

We had what the Japanese (and CNN) called a 7.2 and the Taiwanese called a 6.7 at 8:26 that shook the building pretty good. Not enough to knock stuff off the shelves, but enough to let you know the earth is moving. We're on the 42nd floor, and it was swaying side to side pretty damn good. Enough to make you want to hold on... I guess it lasted about a minute. Then 8 minutes later at 8:34, we got a 7.0/6.4 which started as a jackhammer (up and down rather than side to side) for maybe 20 seconds before switching to a swaying motion that caused the building to make some nasty sounds as the glass and steel creaked rather loudly.

The epicenter of both of the big quakes was about 200km to the south, so the reported intensity at Taichung was somewhere between 3 and 4. I was having fun until I saw the look on the faces of my clients. Guess I'm too stupid to know better....