3 weeks in a giant turtle's shell

Good Morning to everybody in the Netherlands and hello to the rest of the world.
Sorry I haven’t wrote anything for a while, I’ve been busy and without good internet

In the past few weeks I (we) did a lot, and I planned to write several blogs, however It’s a pain in the ass to write everything in detail so I’ll try to be as summarily as possible and tell you everything in one go.

Basically, a few weeks ago I went to the art museum with Hanwei and one of my teachers who is a volunteer there (Zhou laoshi, my “Taiwanese mom”, She explained some different typical and somewhat famous Asian paintings. And after, we went for Tea at Chun Shui Tang. Here we met a friend of Zhou laoshi who is a volunteer at the art museum as well, but also a pharmacist and a volunteer at the science museum where they had a Tea and a Chinese medicine exhibition.

For those who don’t know, I’ve been interested in tea for a while now, so I became pretty excited when she invited us to come to the science museum for a short tour.
The tour existed out of a hello, some free tickets and a quick round through the museum because she was quite busy at that moment. But the quick hello was accompanied by a bag full with two different and not cheap tea boxes and a nice bag of snacks for in between the sips.
To help me get started on tasting different teas ^^

The exhibition on tea was quite interesting; they showed how teapots etc. were made (live). And there were pictures and text about the history of Chinese and Taiwanese tea and which countries and people helped to develop it. (There was also a Dutch merchant somewhere… of course  )

The Chinese medicine exhibition was a bit bigger than the tea one, and looked really interesting with a lot of jars with herbs and plants and dolls with pressure points, but unfortunately everything was in academically-Chinese, which means that even Hanwei and his friend weren’t really able to understand it, let alone translate it into English, so about 15 minutes later we were finished.

A few days later Hanwei, 4 friends and I went to Korea, there were 3 Korean friends. And we did a lot; I visited one of my English students of Pre-bachelor coaching, and his family and we had traditional Korean lunch. We visited the family of one of Hanwei’s Korean friends and had Korean barbeque a few times. Which was really, really nice ^^.
We also went to Lotte world, a smaller but mostly indoor version of Euro Disney. And we went to an aquarium. Hanwei and his friends went skiing, but as I don’t really like skiing I went to a kitchen drum show called Nanta, which was very nice.

I also got ripped off on my quest of finding rice tea, where an old man told me:” this is the famous traditional brown rice tea”, which we shortly after found out to be just normal green tea, but 8 euro a pack :\
The rice tea I thought I was looking for later turned out to be wheat tea, which could be bought in any convenience store for about 2 euro..

On the last evening we went to a Korean bath house which is comparable to the Dutch sauna but then separated per gender. The separated area existed out of a room with a tv, several hot tubs, showers, scrub stuff and 2 sauna’s one of about 60 degrees and one of about 120 degrees…

There was also a common area with some hot rooms (which are rooms where it’s between 40 to 100 degrees) and a cold room (where you could scrape ice of the walls), a big TV and something you can use as beds.

The communal area also had food and drinks and you can just stay in this bathhouse for as long as you like, meaning also overnight. So if you wish, you can live here which is a pretty cool idea. Unfortunately we only went here on the last night, as I strangely enough really enjoyed it (I’m quite a prude). I now hope to visit more bathhouses or hot springs if I ever get the occasion again.

Oh, for those who are wondering, there was no “funny business” anywhere in the bathhouse; it was more an atmosphere of a very big house existing only of bathrooms and a common sleeping area where you kind of just mind your own business.

The weather was freaking cold, especially in the beginning it was about minus 15, to -20 degrees Celsius. Later it became about 10 to 15 degrees.

The Korean people in general were quite cold and rude. A few examples are: somebody slammed a door in Hanwei’s face, noticed, only looked at Hanwei by moving his eye for a split second and then just kept walking as if nothing happened. Or you’d help somebody who dropped something, and wouldn’t be looked in the eye and actually would just be ignored.
Good thing though that there were also very hospitable and kind Koreans to make it all in all a nice experience.

Then, shortly after we got back in Taiwan it was Chinese/ lunar New Year. Which as you might know is a very big happening in most of Asia. And although it sounds very interesting, Chinese make the best fireworks, right?, most people I talk to experience it as very, very boring.
Basically you stay with your family for about 4 days, and then move to another part of your family for another few days. And most families are not very interesting.

The first family we visited was the grandpa of Hanwei, the dad of his dad, in Beidou(or something). And there was an aunt, an uncle, Hanwei’s parents, his sister and the grandpa. The place we stayed at was quite small and there was no good internet connection. Next to that my Chinese wasn’t really good enough to communicate with any of them nor was their English good enough to communicate with me. With exception of a trip to a big temple and a bicycle ride around the town it was pretty boring but we did find some things to make it more interesting for ourselves.
We bought lottery tickets, managed to teach Hanwei’s sister an English game called citadels (Machiavelli in Dutch) and I somehow managed to get a conversation going in Chinese about different meat in different countries and it went as deep as genetic manipulation and organic stuff… which was very strange because it’s incredibly difficult, yet I only need a few words translated by Hanwei^^..

The other part we went to Hanwei’s mom’s sister’s husband’s family in Taidong (dong means east). This was a lot more fun as his family is quite a bit bigger, there were more people of our age and there was a lot of nice landscape to see. The trip towards Taidong took about 6 hours as we had to drive from Taichung, west middle of Taiwan, to the Kaohsiung the south, to Taidung which is east middle of Taiwan. It took so long because there are a lot of high mountains in the middle of Taiwan which you have to drive around.

In Taidong we’d drive through the mountains and walk through the landscape during the day and in the evening we went to a rice factory, owned by hanwei’s uncle’s family to meet the family and play Mah-jong, (which I learned there) it was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed it. And .. I only lost about 10 euro over three days on gambling with Mah-jong ;)

Oh yeah, before Chinese new year we had dinner with the company where Hanwei’s mom works. (owned by the husband of the mom’s sister..) The dinner was huge, with fresh fish, and expensive shark fin soup, lobster and huge scallops. And every kid, including me got a red envelope with some money ^^.

Now I’m back in Taichung, and preparing for the study, Wednesday I’ll have to select some more courses and then I hope to begin class on Thursday.. if there are any classes for me to follow.
The weather here is getting a lot better; sometimes walking in a t-shirt is even too warm. And.. my piano skills are slowly improving.

I hope you were able to read the whole thing I’ll try and update more often with shorter blogs next time.
Enjoy the cold weather there in the low lands;).

Cheers,
Tommy