I also wanted to note that on the first day here, I tried a dessert that we found, called a mochi. It is a circle shaped food that had a strangely gelatinous outer layer, with filling that tasted like a fig newton. One bite was enough for me.
Today was a slow day. We didn't do much until mid afternoon due to some medical problems of mine and other issues. I was fidgeting with my phone and I somehow pressed the button cobination eeded to bring up the menu to initiate a factory reset of the phone. Panicking, I pressed the main phone button, which then fully initiated the reset. I tried pressing more buttons, but nothing was stopping it, so I pulled out the battery. After putting it back in, the phone refused to start, showing a command error. With my laptop and google's help, I was able to get it to work again, by having it go through with the reset. So, I lost everything on my phone. Luckily, all of my music, photos, and podcasts are stored on my sd card. It took quite a while to redownload most of the essential apps. I was still downloading essential apps through the end of the day. Oh well.
We decided to look through all the shops in town. Unfortunately, we found out that most were extremely overpriced. This isn't too surprising I suppose, given that this is a tourist oriented town. We picked up two little gifts. We found a place advertising coal and gold chocolate and a place called Condom World, that we only viewed from a distance. We also found a cave looking entrance with writing along the walls that led back to the main street.
We looped up and around the main street to view the Buddhist temple again in daylight. The detail put into it was incredibly beautiful. We were also able to get a view of the hike we planned to take around sunset.
We wanted to take the hike once the sun was mostly down, which led us to missing a lot of the sunset, but got great views of the town and its neighboring towns. We were also able to see Taipei in the distance. On the first observation deck, we saw what Stephanie identified as graveyards above the town.
The hike started off easy, but grew much steeper, with many, many steps. At the top, it was almost completely dark. We used a flashlight app to walk our way down. We also passed two other hikers, one with a flashlight and one with a headlamp. The views were incredible. It also helped with my fear of heights on the way down, as only a few steps were illuminated at a time.
Once we were nearly at the bottom, we reached an observation deck. I excitedly walked toward the railing for pictures and to yell something down towards an annoying ocarina player in town, whose tune carried up the entirety of the mountain(and which we heard nonstop playing the same 5 tunes throughout the day), when I ran right in to a bench that I did not know was there. My shin swelled up surprisingly quick and large. We walked back to the room, iced it, elevated it, compressed it in a wrap, and I took ibuprofen. This morning it was mostly down and I don't feel any pain. I will keep it compressed and keep an eye on it.
On another note, I have found the Google Translate application to be most helpful. You can use its video function to take a picture of something and then translate the words on it. We used this to identify a bag of food last night. I then gave two translations to the bed and breakfast operators to modify my breakfast and to update them on replacing towels in my room. The video/picture functioning is truly amazing and like science fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment