Danshui in the Rain / The Dong Po Lo was amazing

First of all, why do I get up so early? It’s like 8:30AM…

It ended up being a relatively uneventful day, especially when compared to my first day. We went to lunch with a lot of Chandler’s relatives, which was spectacular. The Dong Po Lo was so good! It’s like some pork dish with syrup on it that is very tender. The restaurant was very nice as were his family. I must admit that I was kind of a novelty. Everyone wanted to meet me and the young children seemed especially interested.

From there we made our way towards Danshui, which is like a wharf area where the large river in Taipei meets the ocean. We stopped and got some salty eggs on the way (pretty weird). We also checked out Guan-Da temple at the stop. From here we continued to Danshui, but when we got there it was raining so hard that we decided not to stay. However, we got back in the car and Chandler’s father insisted that we walk down the street. He drove us over to the street and dropped us off. Chandler, his mother, youngest brother, and myself shared 2 umbrellas, but we still got pretty wet. It was very interesting though and well worth it. There are a lot of food vendors there selling eccentric things. In the 20 minutes we walked around I tried octopus balls, fried bird eggs, a potato on a stick, candied tomato, and some strange rice thing. Since there’s an MRT stop in Danshui we’re going to go back some day when it’s nice because it looked really cool, and I didn’t really get a chance to check anything out.

We got back to Chandler’s around 6PM and I promptly fell asleep for about 2 hours. Chandler got me up and we went to a Thai restaurant near the condo that was very good and we stopped at a convenience store and picked up some local beers to drink when we got back. We just fooled around a bit back at Chandler’s and I went to bed.

Today looks promising. It’s mostly cloudy, but dry, and I don’t think it’s going to rain. I’m not sure what the plan is, but I heard something about climbing a mountain coupled with a hot spring??? Or possibly the National Palace Museum, which I understand is roughly equivalent to The Henry Ford…

Cheers.