Two Weeks Left!

Halfway there! Although there are some places I'm looking forward to going to, I'm also looking forward to getting home or at least to finish teaching.

Here are some pictures from the week!

At the Taipei Main Station

My new giraffe earrings

There's a hotpot restaurant called Cash City near our hotel. For 160NT (~$5.33) we get a platter of stuff and meat of our choice and our own hot pot. We also get unlimited drinks that include tea, pop, and mango slushie. Yes. Mango slushie. There's also unlimited ice cream that you can get yourself!

Meat hasn't arrived yet but everything else has!

One scoop of chocolate, one scoop of peanut butter. Yum!

For the weekend, everyone split up. Some people wanted to hike somewhere, some went to burn on a beach, some went shopping at the places I had gone to. Since I didn't want to do any of those and I had a goal of my own, I went off by myself which probably makes me happier anyways because I don't have to wait for anyone, especially since I had a goal. My goal: get the pennies!!!

So first I went to Dansui Old Market to pick up those Little Mermaid socks for Ga Jie since I couldn't find them anywhere else. The last time I went, I found a penny machine so I didn't go for that. But the last time I went, there was a typhoon coming so there weren't many places open. This time I found a second penny machine. Yay!

10NT (~$0.33)

Whoohoo!

New sunglasses 150NT (~$5)
Looks like my old ones but cheap enough that
if they break, I won't care.

After Dansui, I headed to the Astronomical Museum. Except, I got lost! I went the wrong way and headed in the complete opposite direction. (This seems to be a theme this weekend...story to come later.) If you can see the map down there, I ended up where the guy on the bike is. But I should have been to the left of the vertical red line. Oops! Got lots of exercise I guess.

Lost! Help me, map!

Found you!

Ooh...didn't pay money to go in though.

Found the penny machine!

Ok so this penny machine also has a story. I knew that the machine was in the gift shop and I didn't have to pay to get in so great! I purchased two copper tokens: one for me, one for my friend Jessica. Then I put the copper coin into the #1 slot and I should have put it in the #2. So I turn around to ask the cashier to help me and some little girl runs up and presses the button so a penny pops out. Luckily I just told the cashier that some little girl pressed the button and he gave me another one to replace it. Yay! Thanks, little girl! You saved me from shaming myself and admitting I put it in wrong despite the English instructions.

Next I walked over to Shilin Night Market to find the penny machine that someone told me was there. I found it! I notice that when I get a penny, a lot of people gather around to see what it's about. These ones are cute and have a bubble tea pattern on them!

On Sunday, a group of us were going to Pinxi/Shifen to light up lanterns. I was very excited for this because it was one of the destinations that I was supposed to go with Aunt Alice and never happened because of the typhoon. So we meet up (and some are hungover from going to a club the night before) and we get the tickets. We needed to to this: Taipei --> Ruifang, Ruifang --> Pinxi. We got tickets to and from so there are 4 in total. Since there was only 10 minutes before the train left (and they're very prompt) we had to run for it. We asked someone where the platform was and double checked the screen. We got on and it left on time. So we're not really sure how...but somehow we ended up on the wrong train! We didn't realize this until 1 hour later. So we got a lot of help from some English speaking locals and non-English speaking train workers and we ended up heading back to Taipei. We tried to figure out how long it would take us to go to Pinxi and found that it would take too long. Added to that we had some hung-over people who got motion sickness quite easily and...never made it. We went back to the Taipei Main station and called it a day. They decided to hit up some other tourist spots instead and I went shopping, then home to do some work for school.

This is where we started.

The right finger is where we should have ended up.
The left finger is where we actually ended up.

So that's the end of the weekend. I have one more weekend left. All the teachers new to Taiwan are going to Taroko Gorge next weekend (which I went to the last time I was here) so unfortunately, they won't have time to go back to Pinxi. But I will try to go to Jiufen and Pinxi on my last weekend.

Now to work hard for school. There are many things that need to happen this week, including finishing report cards and because one guy messed up his unit, I have to plan the whole thing on my own from scratch. T_T