Goodbye Taichung. Hello Taipei.

We talked until 3am last night and it was really hard to get up this morning....... Darren took me around Morrison Academy as a way of persuading me to come to Taiwan, haha. It is quite nice though. The school is very well developed.... and a lot of the equipment is much nicer than my school.

They have a swimming pool!

Nicely decorated staircases and emblems.

Very nice track.

They even have these carnivals during the year to attract neighborhood people... this is their haunted house.

But I don't think I have a calling to go to Taiwan at this time...... so yeah, definitely will keep it in the back of my mind.

So I hung out with the Lu family today. Adele and Darren definitely trained their kids really well! Four kids and they are all very well-behaved and are always loving towards each other. Janelle is definitely a very mature oldest sister... always taking care of her brothers with a kind heart :)

We went to Sun Moon Lake today as a Taichung must visit place. Quite pretty :) We took the boat ride around the lake to eat some very delicious Taiwanese lunch. Quite good... but a bit too oily.

And I guess the thing to buy at Sun Moon Lake is actually their Assam tea! Whoa... I didn't know they're popular for black tea there... but they are! Got some for my family and they gave me a cup of Assam tea for "service" (as they say in Korean).

For dinner, we went to this all you can eat hot pot place. I've never seen so much food in one place....... I was truly in awe.

Alright...... and that is the end of the food expo. However, I really had no appetite today so I barely ate anything :( About the taste... well, I think it's mediocre. A lot of the food didn't taste really good..... it's more for variety and quantity than quality. But I still thank the Lu's for taking me to all these places!

Lastly....... High Speed Rail ride up to Taipei. This is the ultimate traveling by yourself experience.

I left Taichung station at 10:40pm, so I was probably one of very few people who were getting on the train. I got to Taipei at 11:44pm...... and there pretty much nobody at the station. I tried to find the way to the Airbnb the way the host told me, but had some problems.. and I was truly scared carrying a lot of luggages with me at 12am with a lot of homeless sleeping around the station.

Got to the place and couldn't quite open the lock. Long story short, I got in at 12:20am or so..... and saw some flies in the bathroom and a worm that was just hanging out of the hole in the wall inside the bathroom. Sigh. Welcome to Taipei I suppose. Oh yeah, did I mention that I saw quite a few cockroaches on the way to the Airbnb? I haven't seen cockroaches for a very long time...... they were quite large.

I don't know why, but I've never felt scared walking on the streets in Korea at night. Ok, I do feel scared sometimes when I walk by closing restaurants at like 11:30pm, when there is just a lot of ajeossi hanging outside the restaurants or some young people just sitting and drinking.... but I can easily avoid them by walking on the other side of the street with less people. However, I feel quite scared being in Taipei by myself. I think it's just that Korea seems a lot more developed than Taipei is.... in the neighborhoods and all that. The streets are neater and more organized, things work and they work the same way across all the cities, and I haven't seen homeless people on the street except near Seoul Station and Namdaemun. Taipei so far (maybe it's because it's midnight) seems a bit scary. People are not very friendly... even though I speak Chinese! And things just seem more messy......

Well, we'll see how it looks like when I go sightseeing tomorrow. I'm truthfully a bit tired from all this travel.... so we'll see if I make it out of my room in good time tomorrow. I might want to just rest a bit for a day.....

Oh yeah, I just realized that my luggages are really full. Yes, I can't believe it either. There is pretty much no room to buy any more things. I can't believe I bought that much stuff in Korea... so yeah, I'm not really sure what I'm gonna do in Taipei now. Haha. There is no room to put any more stuff unless I get a new luggage....... we'll see what happens to that as well.