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 Our next, and by far my favorite stop was Beijing. With Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall, the 2008 Olympic Games stadiums, and numerous markets and Hutong communities, Beijing shows you ancient history to present day. The architecture from all eras is amazing to see.
We visited the Summer Palace first, which took an entire day to walk through. The weather was quite cold to what we expected of China, but it was a nice change. It included a huge man-made lake, hand-dug as a birthday gift to the queen. That night, it was the site of the 2008 Olympics. Unfortunately, the Bird’s Nest stadium was no longer lit to save energy, but the Water Cube was in full swing. Both were very cool to see up close! The next day was dedicated to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. As impressive as they are, we were there in peak season, which meant we had to battle the crowds to catch a glimpse of anything or to get a good shot. We decided to ditch the crowds and go to the Temple of Heaven, where seniors practiced karaoke and calligraphy in the surrounding gardens.
The next day was my most anticipated destination, the Great Wall. We visited the Jinshanling section, and walked to Simatai, we were told by many people that the more tourist (trap) friendly section called Badaling, was really ‘Bad’, full tilt with souvenir shops/McDonald’s . It was a pretty challenging little hike, considering the condition parts of the Wall were in. Regardless, it was a beautiful day, and was certainly all we had expected and more. You can see all the marvelous photos from Beijing HERE. Next stop, ]Xian/Shanghai.
 Hey everyone! There has been a lack of posts recently, but I wanted to fill everyone in on what Nat and I have been up to. We had a wonderful Turkey dinner on Christmas day that our roommate, Beth, organized at a nearby Italian restaurant; needless to say it was a huge success! To kick off 2009, we went to see the Taipei 101 fireworks with our friend Emil which were the best 3 minute fireworks display we have ever seen, although it was a tad short.
We also bought a new digital camera, a Panasonic Lumix FZ28, which all the recently posted pictures were taken with. It has a really far optical zoom which is a feature we were both looking for and the price was right. We are both really satisfied with the purchase and I should have some good Christmas/New Year’s Eve HD videos posted up soon. You can read more about the camera here.
We are both heading to Malaysia/Borneo for Chinese New Year for a 2 week vacation which we are both extremely excited for — so planning for that has taken up most of our time recently. You can see all our recent xmas/new year’s pictures HERE. Thanks for checking out my site and comments are always appreciated!
 After HK, it was on to Guilin and Yangshuo. To get there, we took the oddest bus I’ve ever seen–an overnight sleeper bus full of tiny, coffin-sized bunk beds. It looked like catacombs, and if you were more than 5′8 and 150 lbs., you’d be on the floor if the bus took a corner. After an 11 hour ride, we were there, and upon exiting the bus, random strangers were in hot persuit of us trying to sell us tours and get us to stay in their hotels. For our entire stay, the people here were very pushy, but the amazing scenery made up for the persistant locals.
On our first day, we took the bus to visit Seven Star Park. The highlight of this was definitely the Seven Star cave–a really impressive cave with tonnes of colored lights placed around the rocks to accent the formations. It took about a half hour to walk through the entire thing. Then we found a taxi driver willing to drive us around all afternoon for the bargain price of $5.00. He took us to the Reed Flute cave, which was basically the same idea as Seven Star, but a bit larger and more impressive. That night, we took a took a river cruise, and along the way saw plenty of pagodas and a short opera performance.
The following day, we booked a day tour of Yangshuo, which is much more rural than Guilin, and has a much more impressive scenery. It has narrow but tall, green rolling mountains everywhere. Unfortunatly, like the majority of tours in China, we were roped into going to a stupid crystal factory where they herd you into the showroom and expect you to buy things. Luckily, it was short lived, and we moved onto a river raft cruise followed by the highlight, a two hour boat cruise down the Li River. If you’ve ever seen The Painted Veil, this is the same type of landscape. That evening, we got tickets to to a show called Impressions Liu Sanjie, a show that took place entirely on water. It is directed by Zhang Yimou, who also did the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The choreography and sheer manpower of this show was amazing.
The next day, it was off to Beijing. You can see all our Guilin/Yangshuo photos HERE – Nat
 Hi everyone!! We finally made it back home to Taiwan. It was a really awesome trip, I’ve been on a few and this trip has definitely been the most history enriched and sightseeing vacation that I have ever taken. Hong Kong was a blast, with its metropolitan city life, amazing night markets, shopping and amazing food! This city really feels like it never sleeps. At night, the streets are filled with night markets, bright neon signs and people eating and walking around until the wee hours of the morning. We all stayed in Hong Kong for the first 4 days until we got our China visa and lived on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong across HK island. I have posted pictures in the photo gallery HERE.
These were some really cool things we liked about the city: there are whole streets/areas dedicated to selling fish/aqua life, a huge flower selling street, Lantau island (big bronze Buddha, and amazing cable car ride), Hong Kong’s amazing skyline, night markets with loads of counterfeit stuff, and so much great food. I have also made some comments with particular photos. I will try and post a set of pictures for each city we visited in China, in each coming week. There were some really amazing photos that were taken so check back soon! Next stop… Guilin.
 Hey everyone, I apologize for the lack of posts lately. We haven’t been up to too much lately because we are saving $ for an upcoming trip; my camera also got some salt water in it after a wave crashed near me at a beach, so some pictures have a purple haze. To keep it short, we visited the 2nd tallest Ferris wheel in the world at Mirimar park in Taipei, went to Yinge which is a famous for its ceramics, and went up the Taipei 101. You can see all the pictures HERE. There are also some pictures of our apartment/outside pool, and our Moon Festival celebrations which include the Pomelo head tradition.
This upcoming week, Nat and I will be meeting up with my parents in Hong Kong and taking a 3 week trek of China; so you should expect a massive post when we get back; we hope to see all the major sites and beautiful scenery/history that China has to offer — it’s the first time any of my family has visited China, we are all really excited for this trip! Talk to you all soon!
 Wow, two posts in one month! Nat and I went to a place called Jiou-Fen 九份 this past weekend, which is in Taipei County near the northern tip of the Taiwan coast line. Jiou-Fen is located within the Rueifang township 瑞芳鎮 which you take a high-speed train to from the Taipei MRT for about $2. This area was very well known in the 20th century as a gold/mining town and was once occupied by the Japanese (that’s why there are Japanese style houses/museums in the area); people also used to refer to it as “Little Shanghai” due to the similarities. The highlight of the visit was definitely the amazing views, and the pictures don’t really do them justice, but you can at least get an idea of what we saw – they were the best we have seen so far in Taiwan. Also, within In Jiou-Fen, we visited the Gold Ecological Park where there was the world’s largest man-made gold bar, which was 220 kg and .999 pure gold… and you can touch it. You can see all our great pictures HERE along with my comments. I’ll be writing again soon, we miss you all back home very much!
ps. we’re planning on going somewhere else special this weekend for my birthday, so expect some more pics soon.
 Hi everyone! the past month has been pretty good for us. We’re working more hours now and we decided to stay at the dorm a bit longer since we got the biggest room here and it’ll help save money for the both of us. We haven’t been up to too much lately, but we did make a trip to some place in Taipei (again).
There’s a famous temple called ‘Longshan’ temple which we visited and took some pictures of. We also went to Danshui, which is the furthest stop north on the MRT (subway) and it’s a really beautiful place to visit. It’s right on the waterfront and reminded us a lot of Halifax harbour. There were so many little stores, food vendors and activities there to spend a good afternoon having fun; we went with our friends Dena and Megan, and had a blast. This past weekend, Nat and I went to Wulai scenic park and took some really great photos. It’s in the most southern stop on the MRT in Taipei and is up in the mountains (which most of Taiwan is surrounded by). We went up a gondola and spent a good day walking around and snapping pics. You can see all the great photos HERE.
Sorry for the lack of posts, we will try and get one up at least once a month (so hopefully we both do something cool every month). Until next time, talk to you all soon! And thanks to everyone who is keeping in touch and writing comments!
 Hey everyone! We haven’t been up to that much lately, but we did have an amazing time at Yilan beach/market a couple weeks ago. We traveled with one of my friend’s back home and her local Taiwanese friend. It was a cloudy day, so I didn’t take pictures of the beach this time but, there was some really great waves and I had my first attempt at surfing. The night market in Yilan was really good, and I tried ’stinky to-fu’ for the first time… it’s a Taiwanese delicacy and basically smells like stinky feet and you can smell it a mile away. We also went to the Taipei zoo which was amazing! for 60 NTD or $2 CDN you can spend your entire day at the zoo, and it’s really big… we didn’t even get a chance to see everything our first trip there. There was also a recent holiday here in Taiwan, called ‘Dragon boat festival’. I didn’t get a chance to see any dragon boat races, but there was a free Opera in a park near our place with around 5000+ people in attendance. It was really good and was performed by Taiwan’s most famous Opera group. I have posted new pictures of Yilan market, the Taipei zoo and the Opera HERE, along with comments on the pictures. If I ever get a chance to upload some videos, I will post them here as well.
 Hey everyone! sorry for the very delayed post… as you may have read, my laptop broke down a few hours before we left, so I didn’t have a computer for the first little while; and I waited until I got a decent amount of pictures to tie in with the post. I ended up buying a mac (macbook, 2.4 ghz 4gb ram) for the first time, and everything has gone great with it so far. We live in a smaller city next to Taipei (the capital of Taiwan) called Taoyuan. It’s a small city (compared to Taipei), but by no means not busy… the ‘downtown’ area is bustling with stores and shopping malls and the streets are filled with scooters and cars. Traveling by scooter is the main choice for people in Taiwan because they are relatively cheap to buy/ maintain… you can buy a used one for little as $300 CDN. Our English school provides free living accommodations in the dorm which has been pretty decent so far, and the other teachers living here have been great and have tons of advise for us. I think we may move out soon because living in a really nice apartment can cost as little as $130 a month — I will keep you posted.
Let’s begin with the positives so far. Food is really cheap here comparatively to Canada, you can pretty much eat a really good meal at a restaurant for around $5-10 CDN, or the many street vendors with a big plate of fried rice or chow-mein for $1.50. There’s many all-you can eat ‘hot-pot’s’ where you cook all your food for $6… they have really good… and for alcohol drinkers, I have been told there’s many all you can drink bars for $5. There’s also plenty of fruit for dirt cheap at grocery stores and markets nearby our place; there are so many interesting and different foods you can get at the markets… It’s also been really great weather with only a couple rainy periods, averaging 25-29 Celsius here during the daytime and still warm enough for t-shirts and shorts at night; It’s not even ’summer’ time yet, so we’re in for some hot weather coming up. Also, when it rains, it pretty much pours. Taking a bus here is pretty cheap too, $.75 for a one-way ride and they have very nice comfortable ones at certain destinations.
Although nothing has been really bad so far, there have been some minor issues that we have run into. We haven’t been able to work many hours yet because our work permits haven’t been processed yet, so not much $ has been made so far. We are taking it easy and using our free time traveling to Taipei on the weekend, taking teacher workshop classes or just vacationing. Another issue for me is transportation. Twice a week I have to take two buses to get to one of the schools I teach at, and it eats up bit of my time, but it’s fine for now since I have a lot of free time. There are a lot of scooters around so the air pollution can get to you a bit, but for the most part the air isn’t bad, but many people wear mouth-masks when driving on the street. I don’t mind the air quality but it’s not even close to back home. Also, of course the purchase of my new mac put me back about $1500. I think the first two issues will be sorted out in the next few weeks… I’ll keep you posted.
As for traveling, we’ve only gone to Taipei which has been really nice. It’s a real big city, and we have barely explored it but from what I have seen so far it seems like a happening city to live in with lot’s to do there and many parks around. We went to the Taipei 101 Financial building, National Palace Musuem, the Shilin night market and CKS Memorial building. I have posted all our pictures so far HERE (with a comment explaining the pictures). Oh and one more thing, everyone assumes I speak chinese (mandarin) which I barely can… I’ll be studying hard and let you know how that goes. Also, Nat sticks out like a sore thumb here in Taoyuan… you dont’ see many foreigners on the street let alone a blonde one. Also, remember you can click on the ‘Grab our RSS feed’ link on the top so you can see when my site gets updated. Talk to you all soon!!
 Thanks everyone for showing up to Nat and I’s farewell BBQ as well as Luke, Kelly and Scott’s birthday celebration. It was a beautiful day outside, and a great time to start up the BBQ for the first time in 2 years. You can see all the pictures from the party here. For the next few days I will mainly be packing clothes and getting everything organized for the big move. I will keep everyone updated once I get there, T-2 days. ps. thanks Joe and Nat for taking pictures!
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