Traveling, Typhoons, and other mundane reasons for living!

Howdy folks.  It's been a while since I traveled the dusty halls of blog land. Things are...well...things.  The exciting/terrifying/eagerly anticipated (which may be the same thing as exciting, but what the hell) thing that is going on, is that on Friday, I will start my new job. I will not start teaching on Friday because these folks are very serious.  I will start a month long orientation to prepare me to teach for Kang Chiao International School.  This, my friends, is a real job.  I haven't had one of these in a long time.  Now, while I am looking forward to the challenge, I am also thinking to myself, "Holy crap! I'm actually going to have to do some work!"  Talley Ho! and what not!

Last week, Rebecca and I joined her co-workers on a company sponsored trip to the eastern coast Taiwan cities of Hualien and Taitung. There were about 40 odd folks on the trip from the two branches of Rebecca's company including employees and their families or friends. Now, I've never actually been on one of these scripted tours where you are at the mercy of the schedule, which led to my being a tad grumpy the first day because things were moving faster than I would have preferred.  Rebecca however, put and end to that by telling me to suck it up and go with the flow. Me, being the dutiful husband...cough...gasp...did what I was told and ended up having a good time over all.  I knew I loved that woman for some reason.  Anyway, we toured part of Toroko National Park that Rebecca and I hadn't been to before (see previous post). The Baiyang Waterfall Trail is a winding trail through a deep gorge marked by a number of tunnels blasted through the cliffs that ultimately leads to an underground waterfall that you can stand if you wish.  I wasn't so interested in the waterfall, but there were a number of places where the water in the river at the bottom of the gorge pooled in such an inviting way that I really wanted to go in. Unfortunately, sheer drops of 50-100 or more feet generally discouraged this. It's beautiful country regardless, and if you ever travel to Taiwan, it is well worth the visit.

The next day, we headed off to a clam museum. I opted to wander around outside since the whole thing was in Chinese, and I really don't like clams that much. One of the things that you could do, was jump in a pond and dig for clams. Once you got the clams, then you could bring them to the little restaurant area, where they would cook 'em up for you and you could have a feast.  Fortunately for me, many of Rebecca's co-workers are beer drinkers, so while they ate their clams, I got to drink beer. This is always a good thing. After the clam thing, we all got on the bus, and the tour guide broke out the karaoke machine. Now, I was not aware of this (although the clues have been there now that I think about it), but my wife is a karaoke queen. She even has a pretty decent voice.  The bottom line is, Rebecca LOVES karaoke (we were on a Noraebus, for my Korean friends, lol). I did my duty and sang a couple of songs, but the fact that it was the middle of the day, and I wasn't blind drunk, my singing voice was not at it's best. We finally arrived at the hotel - all the hotels were very nice - but this one was kind of like Disneyland.  It had a swimming pool, a bar, game rooms with billiards and table tennis among other things, and live music (I often want to ask the guys that play in these hotel cover bands what they do for "real" music, but a gig is a gig I suppose. After going for a swim in the pool, Rebecca and I met some of her co-workers and proceeded to down three cases of beer in one of the rooms. Now Rebecca is not what you would call a drinker by any means, and in truth, she does not approve of my predilection for the the sweet, delectable, barley and hops beverage.  However, she is a good sport and only gave me a couple of sideways glances.

Too be continued (with photos)...

What happened America?

I don't understand my country anymore.  A country built by immigrants that now hates immigrants.  A country that claims to respect the individual freedoms of all its citizens but truly only respects the rights of those citizens who can pay for them.  A country that believes in liberty, freedom of speech and freedom of religion but only as long as it is the RIGHT kind of speech or the RIGHT kind of religion. A country that spends trillions of dollars to send young men and women to fight and die in stupid, useless wars yet can't find the cash to properly care for those young men and women when they come home crippled and maimed.  A country that says, "Hey. You're poor? FUCK you!  A country built on compromise and intellectual ideas that now seems to believe that compromise is a dirty word and that ideas and intelligence are some sort of cancer. A country that will will get all gussied up this coming weekend to celebrate the independence of a nation that no longer knows who or what it is.

That makes me sad.