I bought a new camera.

I bought a Holga the other day. Since I spend all my money on beer and cigarettes, I wasn’t able to afford the Canon flash that I wanted to buy, so I bought this instead. I got an alright deal and I even bought an external flash attachment for it just for kicks. I’ll be trying it out this weekend and see what comes out. Hopefully I can get my hands on a scanner at some point.

My mom's not capable of making many facial expressions, but this is her most common one, displeased.  She'll probably make this face when I tell her that I've posted pictures of her on the Internet.

I took some pictures in Hongdae before I left.

Creepy

These statues are in my backyard, which probably has the oddest assortment of items.

Longshan Temple

It must be something I ate.

Triple cheeseburger combo from a McDonald's in Taiwan

That’s right.  It’s a mother fucking triple cheeseburger.  I’m not even ashamed to say that I’ve had more than one of these on my trip.

Hualien

Hualien is a city on the east coast of Taiwan.  It depends on which train you take, but it's about two to four hours from Taipei.  Initially, Evan and I only planned on staying two days, but we liked the city so much and we were just lazy to go somewhere else, we ended up staying four days.  During the four days, we did quite a bit of random stuff.  The first day we ended up renting bikes and just exploring the city.

Here are the two bikes we rented poorly locked to a bench in the middle of nowhere.  Since it is on the coast, Hualien has access to beaches, although none of them extraordinary.  We even managed to find the ocean while riding our bikes around Hualien.

This is the view from Jici Beach, which is a 90 minute bus ride away from the city of Hualien.  It's alright.  The travel book said that it was one of the few swimmable beaches in Taiwan.  However, it is in the middle of nowhere and doesn't have a place to eat.  You could take surf lessons though.

This is an entrance to Taroko Gorge.  There's a free shuttle to different destinations within the gorge that's offered by the city, but we hired a cab to take us and drive us to all the spots.  It was a great choice since we saw a whole lot in a shorter amount of time and it cost about $12 USD.

In general, Hualien is nice small city.  Even though I'm not particularly fond of nature things, the natural attractions surrounding the city were impressive.

The Taipei Zoo

First of all, I'm going to have to say that I love zoos.  I really do.  Going to the Taipei Zoo might be the most memorable part of the trip.  There's nothing in the world that makes me feel like a human being than seeing animals in captivity.  Nothing.  The fact that the Taipei Zoo is the largest in Asia also helps.

These are the signs for the zoo right off the conveniently located Taipei Zoo subway stop.

The zoo has animals from all over the world, including this zebra.  A nice surprise was seeing American animals, like the brown bear and the otter.

One of the coolest exhibits in the zoo was the butterfly exhibit.  The entire thing was a greenhouse that you could walk through and butterflies were everywhere you looked.

However, the coolest thing to see in the zoo was the pandas.  I've never seen any before.  In person, they sort of look artificial, like they were animatronic.  However, they were fucking badasses.  For one thing, all they did was sit and eat shit.  After that, they took a nap while hundreds of people were watching them.

The zoo's so big and it was a pretty hot day when we went, so we didn't make it around to seeing every animal, but I would definitely recommend the zoo to anyone visiting Taiwan.

The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial

The first thing we did in when we got to Taipei was go to this memorial.  Sadly, I don't really know anything about Chiang Kai-Shek but this is his memorial.

You might not be able to tell from the picture, but it's four stories up from the base to the entrance.  It was a bitch to walk up in the heat and it was sad when we found out there was an elevator that we could have taken.

This is the statue that sits inside the structure.  I think it's weird that he's smiling.

Champion Ping-Pong Club's two greatest members

Since Ian is leaving on Saturday and my lessons are done, we wanted to leave something for our ping pong coach to remember us by.  We got this picture taken at a studio.  It was a funny ordeal getting our pictures taken, but I think it turned out okay.  We put one in a frame and gave it to our coach.  He cleared a whole shelf on his desk and to put the picture there.  I’m glad we’ll be remembered.