Sun Moon Lake part 2

To get down to Sun Moon Lake a group of us took a tour bus that took us to several places on Saturday and the hotel and then to the event and back home on Sunday. It was a pretty amazing deal even though I had to get up hella early to get the the bus terminal on time. Bleah!
It was a full service trip. Once we were all on the bus we were given bags with some breakfast food in it. Apparently breakfast involves getting diabetes. There were two sweet cake things along the lines of an oatmeal pie and a hostess ding dong. The Taiwanese people like their sweet and they like it to be tooth rotting on an instantaneous level if at all possible.


Here's a picture of the tour bus. So very exciting isn't it? The name on the side of the bus is Tay Feng. This is what typhoon sounds like in Chinese. A little disturbing when you think about it.
The trip on the tour bus was a little bizarre. We are of course the only white people on the bus, which was to be expected. The leaders spoke a fair amount of English and promised to translate as they went. They made a fair effort in the beginning, but it petered out pretty quickly. As far as we could tell they were just telling stories to entertain the group.

About an hour into the trip one of the girls comes back to us and tells us we need to get up in front of everyone and introduce ourselves and tell a little bit about ourselves. We are thinking that this is some weird hazing thing and that they just want to put us on display for reasons we don't want to know about. We told them that we would go after everyone else goes thinking that would be the end of it. Well everyone else on the bus did in fact get up and introduce themselves. So once they were all done we followed suit. It was like a camp bus ride. Strange.

So being on a tour bus we stopped at many places where it would be great to spend money on things. The first place sold lots of beautifully carved wooden things.



Then we were off to the Puli Shaoshing Brewery. They make this distilled alcohol here that they were offering samples of. It's quite harsh and I don't recommend it. Unless possibly you are trying to revive a dead person. I was rather disappointed with the brewery because we were promised sampling of many wines and there were only about 6 different types to choose from. Mostly of the fruit variety and a couple of vinegars. There was an onion flavored one that would be great to cook with. I got a lovely bottle of plum wine.

This is hilarious. The men on this bottle are the current president and vp of Taiwan. There are several different collector bottles of alcohol with their pictures on it. I want our political leaders to have their pictures on bottles of alcohol. Bush would be something sweet and uncomplicated, Obama would be a 40 of something to keep in touch with his roots and McCain would be something aged and dry. Let me hear your suggestions.

This picture says that Liquor makes the classics. They leave it up to you to decide just which classics.
There is no actual dialog down this hallway. I don't understand.

After the brewery we were taken to lunch which was pretty tasty. We sat at round tables and this was pretty cool, because it let us get to know some of the other people on the bus with us. Everyone on this tour is doing the swim at Sun Moon and a good portion of them speak at least a little English.
After lunch we were taken to this amazing Zen Buddhist temple. I will try to do a post for that soon. We were then taken to this paper factory where they make handmade type paper for artsy stuff. There is a long walk uphill to get to the paper place. We were yelled at to stay together and hurry up. I felt like I was being marched towards certain death.
At this point I was relatively exhausted and really not caring that I could make my very own piece of crap fan that I will never use and really didn't want. We were given a tour entirely in Chinese. Learned lots. When we finally got to the crafty part the tour leader couldn't quite understand why I didn't want to participate in the make your own fan project. There was a young girl (maybe 11 or 12) who was standing there as I told her this and she plaintively asked me why and I told her because I didn't want one. She also seemed baffled, but wandered off to do her own.

We were finally allowed back on the bus and taken to the hotel where dinner and rock hard beds were waiting for us. Seriously, these beds were not much softer than the floor and I woke up almost as sore as if I'd slept on the floor.