Seven Star Mountain
Well it’s been three days or so since I last wrote. What have I been up to?
September 7th
Did Laundry again. I was expected at the arcade because I’ve made some friends there and I think they hang out sunday. Somebody texted me around 3-ish to get over there NOW, but they didn’t tell me why.
Turns out Xian/Gamerbee and their entourage where there slaying people on the shitty Arcade Edition cabinets. I got to fight Xian, that was pretty fun. I headed home after a while because it’s fucking hot and otherwise I’d spend a whole shitton of money there.
I also got a free box of free moon-festival foods from one of my friends at the hostel. 很好吃！.
September 8th
Worked a little bit on OlegDB, because I love that project and sometimes I just want to hang out and code. I guess I looked like I was working hard because one of the guests at the hostel went out and bought me some flan. How nice of her, the people here are all awesome. I spent the rest of the day mostly just souvenir hunting for people back home. Managed to find some fun little things.
September 9th
Finally ran out of shampoo, switched to the random cheap “Green Tea & Clay!” stuff that I bought at Carrefour, which is some kind of huge Target-style store. Nice place. Weird shampoo.
Worked on OlegDB a little more, finally finished one of the features I had been wanting to since February or so. Nice. The day before I’d been invited to go play Backetball (Because everyone in America plays Basketball, right?) by one of my friends here, so on the 9th we did. Or well, we shot hoops for a while until the first typhoon I’ve seen here hit so we hung out with some nice older people in some kind of gazebo.
I also got to ride on a moped for the first time, fucking terrifying. I thought it was bad just walking around them, but being on the back of one of those things is even worse. My chaperone said something like “I was in a car crash once, so now I go slow” as we zip through random people, cars, sidewalks, whatever. At least I had a helmet.
September 10th
Started early, 7 AM, which I haven’t done in a while. I’d been invited to hike up the tallest mountain in Taipei, Qixing Mountain. It is also the tallest dormant volcano in Taiwan, and it shows. There is sulfur, steam and hot areas/fumeroles everywhere. It’s pretty intense.
The hike was awesome, 1.6km all up stairs. It was a very long trek up and down, but the weather was pretty nice. It was foggy/misty so the sun wasn’t beating down too bad, but it was still pretty humid and hot. In addition to this there were a ton of random bugs and a couple of lizards that I wasn’t fast enough to take pictures of.
When we finally got to the top, I wanted to leave pretty quickly because these super tiny flies kept sticking to me and dying and it was fucking weird and hot, and there were these thumb-sized bees everywhere and it was so foggy we couldn’t see anything. Fun hike, not worth the view on a bad day.
After, me and and my friend went to Din Tai Fung which is the most famous series of restaurants in all of Taiwan, kind of expensive but extremely good. Very good dumplings.
After that I went and hung out with some other people and played street fighter, because I seem to have fallen into that group a little bit. Nice people, very friendly.
