Here a a few more random pics.


This is Jessie and I making traditional Hakka Tea. The large bowl is grooved with ridges to help grind the ingredients. A variant of a mortar and pestle. It's a lot of work but the outcome is worth it. The ingredients include, green tea leaves, sesame seeds, and peanuts. Instructions: grind into fine powder and add hot water. It was very good. They had small little rice puffs to put on top and some brown sugar. I just imagined the rice puffs were little marshmallows. For a snack they also served machi which is a gummy textured hunk of goo, and in this case it was covered with peanut powder. It sounds gross but it's actually quite good. Jessie and I are also rockin our awesome snoopy shirts my mom sent us. Thanks mom your the best!

Jessie's parents and I back in February. I've come to realize how incredibly white I am. I really need to get a tan!

Taipei 101
I didn't go to the top because the visibility was not that great the day we were there. Didn't want to pay to go to the top of the tallest building in the world and not be able to see any thing.

This is me on Jessie's scooter with my mask on. This was taken just last weekend. It's a lot of fun and everyone is shocked that I can drive a scooter even though I've never driven one before. To bad it only has 49cc

Stargate Log 4.07.09

I arrived in Taiwan on January 26th and now is it May 7th so it's far past due that I post pictures of Taiwan. With the upgrade of my Linux OS things are working much better and unlike previously when trying to do anything on the computer it would look-up every few mins. Thus far it's working well and hopefully will continue to work so I can keep this pictures coming.

This is looking up a dirt road on the east side of my apartment look back at my apartment complex.

This is a confucius temple on the north side the dirt road in the picture above. They frequently have parades and make lots of noise early in the morning. Banging big drums and shotting fireworks. Its like the 4th of July here all the time. People are always shotting off fireworks. It drives me crazy. One night last week it was 12:30 pm and right out back of my apartment you could see a huge firework display and it was so loud. I was slightly infuriated to say the least.


This is a closer shot of my apartment. Its on the left hand side of the picture 7th floor very top.

I was going to add the picture I took of the parade outside my apartment but I couldn't find it amongst my numerous pictures.

Here are just a few pictures from the evening market. Many people stop by after work to pick up stuff for dinner. Yummy!

Stargate Log 1.23.09 - 1.26.09

Stargate Log 1.23.09

MRT

The ladies trying to decide where we should eat at again!





Me trying to be artistic (I love my new camera!)



This is where they decided to go for lunch and it was a superb chose. Fried pork fillet stuffed with cheese, miso soup, and cabbage salad. (amazing!) And it only cost me a small fortune :)

Stargate Log 1.22.09

My first full day in Japan I was still dealing with jet lag but regardless of how tired I was I wasn't going to lay around and sleep. It's not everyday that you get to be in Tokyo. Plus Cindy wouldn't have allowed me to sleep on her floor all day. Cindy really wanted to go to a museum but I knew very little about this particular museum. We went to the Ghibli museum which features the works of a very famous Japanese animator. The latest film which some of you may have heard of is called "Spirit Away". I have yet to see the film or any other works I didn't find the museum all that interesting. It was also cold and raining again that day. Cindy gave us hot pads to put in our pockets to help keep our hands warm. I've seen hot pads before, you know the kind that you shake up and they stay warm for 6 hrs, but usually only for hunters or maybe if you have to sit through a soccer game in the freeze rain. I didn't bring a heavy coat with me for the purpose of saving space and I didn't really feel like dragging a big coat around everywhere. Besides I was moving to Taiwan it's a tropical island I didn't need a coat. Well I last about 1 day in Japan and broke down and bought myself a heavy coat or it was not going to be an enjoyable remaining 4 days. I got one of those big puffy Michelin man jackets but it did the job quite nicely. Sorry about the tangent back to the museum.

Ghibli Museum (Mitaka, Japan)

After our much over stayed visit to the museum we got back to my favorite part, eating! The food in Japan was really good. We also had Cindy who was an excellent tour guide and she took us to all the best spots. The desserts are very good but to a westerners taste not very sweet. Which seems to be true throughout Asia. Us Americans sure like our sweet tea and pecan pie! (its much more fun if you say it with a southern drawl)

I felt like all we did was eat while I was in Japan. Which was fine with me for the first couple of day but it quickly got old. I believe we ate lunch and dinner out all 5 days. Just in case you didn't already know Tokyo is really, really expensive but if you know where to go you can get some really great food.

Oh let me go on a short tangent for a sec...I find it interest to think about the fact that when I am in a foreign place I could be standing right next to a famous person and not even know who they are. Well in Tokyo there are lot of famous people and we were taking a break eating a bit of dessert and some famous person walk by and Cindy and her friend were like oh thats so and so and she's a model. I think it's funny but anyway where was I....oh yes I ate a lot of good but expensive food. I'll throw a few pics up now so you don't get to bored reading this. eeeeewwwwww aaaawwww look at the pretty colors.....

Yummy!

Yum round 2

I think for the sake of time and to move things along to present day musing I will hit the warp speed button and throw up some of the best pictures of my visit to Tokyo. As you can see i've done above. That way you can zip through them rather quickly. I'll include captions and a sentence or two if the picture doesn't sufficiently tell the whole story. I'll put the posts up with different dates in the titles mostly for my own benefit so I can have some record of my trip. I don't like to journal and this is a much better way for me to record things that happened. At least this way I don't feel like I'm writing to myself or nobody, like I do when I write in a journal.

Stargate Log 1.21.09

Well it's been a while since many of you have heard from me so let me start from the beginning. I left for Taiwan on January 21st from St. Louis. We flew to Chicago and then on to Tokyo where we stayed for approximately a week. Jessie's cousin, Cindy lives and studies at a University in Tokyo and was kind enough to let us crash at her incredibly small apartment. It's small yet everything is quite efficient and space saving accessories are rather inventive in Japan. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.

These are a few aerial shots I took between in flight movies.

Canada

Alaska

So when we arrived in Japan Cindy was at the airport to greet us and help us get to her apartment. Little did I know at that moment how far she had traveled to pick us up. I thought we landed in Tokyo, well we did but not really. So after 12+ hours in flight to Japan we then had to get on the MRT with several pieces of large luggage between the two of us. The MRT from Narita to Tokyo took a considerable amount of time. I want to say just under 2 hours but I can't remember exactly. Once we got into Tokyo we then took the subways with a few transfers to get to the area withn Tokyo where Cindy's apartment is. It's rather difficult to naviagate the subways with thousands of people running every which way, running into you without a second glance. Up and down escalators and through rushing crowds we dragged our luggage. No to mention it was really cold and a light rain was falling.

So at this point I should interrupt with a rather humorous story, well humorous to some maybe, but I have yet to move on and allow this situation to be humorous, hopefully in time it will prove to be that. So the night before leaving for Taiwan I did what I consider rather normal, I started packing. Really, it wasn't a big deal and worked out quite nicely for me. (Besides the fact that I didn't sleep that night but I kept telling myself that I could sleep on the plane.) However, my partner in crime didn't weight in on the fact that her suitcase might be, say overweight. So at 4:30am she came over to my house with her luggage and I wanted to make sure that we wouldn't have to donate any of her things to the black hole aka my parents garage. We had originally decided that we would each take only one large suitcase and one carry-on because of our visit to Tokyo. Mind you we had already shipped some of our things to Taiwan. Well to make this story move along Jessie ended up needing to bring another suitcase. I had an extra piece from my luggage set (this is an important detail) and we distributed the extra weight into the additional suitcase. Again this is roughly one hour before we need to leave so I'm sweating a litte at this point. Everything went fine and we got to Tokyo no problems. I grabbed my bag and my carry-on and Jessie grabbed hers. We got to her cousin's apartment and dropped off our things and went and got dinner with a few of Cindy's friends. I get back to the apartment and I'm standing in the middle of this 5 foot wide apartment looking at the suitcases strewed across the floor and I begin to count...1,2,3,4,.... I must have miss counted let me count again 1,2,3,4,................ ummmmmm Jessie didn't we have 5 suitcases. I had 2 and you had 3 right? Where is your third suitcase? Ha......haaa and now I'm crying until I realize that the suitcase I grabbed was her third suitcase, not my large second suitcase with ALL of my clothes and possessions in it. Now I'm sobbing! With all the last minute luggage shuffle and adding another suitcase to the mix (which looked just like mine) I forgot that we had added another bag that matched my black Samsonite set. Fortunately for me I knew well enough to pack a few changes of clothes in my carry-on, so yes, I'm wearing the same clothes in all of my pictures while in Japan and no they weren't dirty, I washed them every other night. Cindy called the airport the next day and gave them the luggage number and I was luckily reunited with all of my clothes (in the whole world) once we arrived in Taipei the following week. I still have a hard time laughing about this but maybe in 10 years it will be funny. Hopefully you find it rather amusing though.

MRT Japan (before I realized I didn't have my suitcase *read above*)

Jessie, Cindy, and I in the subway in Tokyo