Getting Our Olympics On!

The Goal: Find the gold medal game.

Our Result: We ended up at seedy bar in the red light district that was owned by a old Swedish guy. The tensions were high. The Canadians were camped out on the far right side of the bar watching the game intently. There wasn't a fight, but at one point I thought there was going to be after a brief shoving match.

After the gold we took a celebratory picture with the other Cunucks at the bar.

Next Up...

Planning my trip to Dubai. I'll be leaving in 8 days, where I will be joined by my sister for "Hoit Sister Fun", which will include a trip to Tim Hortons. Do you think they'll have double role-up-the-rim there too?

One can only hope!

More Updates from the Art Room

 Here are some of the works my students have been creating:

Gr 11- large surface/acrylic medium project

Gr 12- Miniature project  

Gr 10 Block Printing:

Grade 6 Cut Paper Art:

Weekend at Home

This weekend there was talk of going to Manila, going camping. In the end I decided that I just need to stay put. But of course that also meant we went to the beach, and the movies, because what else is there to do in Subic?

Friday night we went and got messages and then to movies to see American Hustle. It finally arrived in the Philippines!

Saturday we went to the Cayman beach, which is attached to the Ocean Adventure Park, it does dauphin and marine animal shows.  So to try and drum up business they brought a sea lion out onto the beach. An interesting choice.

The next day we went to the beach at Anvaya Resort to play some beach volleyball, and yes I played, and yes I was bad. But we quickly discovered that they had Olympic coverage, something we are all desperately missing.  So we sat at the bar and got super into figure skating while most of the Philippinos around thought we were crazy. 

Taipei Day 3

Taipei Day 3, we slept in and then went for a dumpling brunch. This time we tried a different place, the pork seam buns were great, the dumplings didn't quite live up to the previous day's standard. After we set out the Contemporary Art Gallery. I was excited, I scooped out the website the night before, it was going the be great. And then we get there and it's closed. Which the website failed to disclose. Normally its open on Sundays, but because of the holiday and it having to be open on Chinese New Year it moved its close date to Sunday. So plan B, we'll go to the area where they are setting up the lantern festival for the coming week. 

This is a lantern, apparently they will light up, we're unsure if they will float in the sky or not. 

People write their wishes or what they are thankful (we were told different things by people?) for the New Year and hang them from trees. 

This is a giant mechanical Pegasus for the festival. The Pegasus is covered with CD with peoples wishes written on it. I'm not sure, it's supposed to be by some famous artist. In my opinion it kinda missed the mark.  

Read this:

Now this is the visual depiction of that:

Yes its a lantern, and yes its slightly racist. My real question is how does this depict traders from South East Asia or Africa? There were all kinds of gems like this throughout the park. 

Weirdly awesome at the one transit stop. 

We headed back to our hostel to gather our luggage only to learn our flight had been delayed. We debated venturing to a market, however we decided instead to just get Starbucks, and read our books for a while. We attempted to take transit to the airport but we got to the point where we were supposed to find the bus, unable to locate it in a 4 block radius, gave up and hailed a cab, where I played Pictionary with the driver to get us to the airport. We lucked out that it wasn't until us leaving Taiwan that we ran into a language barrier. 

We hung out at the airport while our flight continued to get delayed, eventually we got on the plane, took off landed at midnight then drove back to Subic for 2am. 

Overall Taipei was a neat city, I was glad I went, but really it's only somewhere you need to go once. 

Taipei Day 2

Day 2 started off with the search for soup dumpling, a Taiwanese speciality that's supposed to be amazing. Our search lead us to Taipei 101, which we were told constantly that it was the second tallest building in the world, which was a lie, it is currently the 4th, and will drop to 5th later this year. Regardless it is really tall with 101 floors or 509 meters in hight. 

Din Tai Fung is a Michelin star restaurant that specializes in xiaolongbao, or soup dumpling for us english speakers. We got there just after 10 and there was already a line. Luckily we were number 9 and they sat us early at 10:30 to try and deal with the crowd. The place smelt amazing. The kitchen was  separated by only a window so you could see you the chefs/dumpling artists hard at work.  

I ordered the Truffle Pork Mushroom Dumpling they were a little pricier at the staggering cost of $15 Canadian (I know it's a little crazy when that's an expensive meal), and they were worth every bit of it. They were by far one of the best things I've had in my life. 

Soup dumpling are similar to regular dumpling in that they have some meat filling with steamed dough around them, what makes them special is that the juice of the meat and veggies are trapped in there creating a soup or broth. The key is to eat them with out burning your mouth or squirting boiling soup onto the person sitting across from you. This is extreme eating. Avoiding injury to yourself and your table guest can be achieved by following these steps carefully. 

Step 1

Pick up the dumpling using chopsticks and dip it into the vinegar-soy sauce mixture (you can also add hot peppers, I choose to forgo that), place your dumpling in your over sized spoon.

Step 2

Gently poke your dumpling so that the soup leaks out into the spoon. If you are too aggressive with this step you run the risk of having hot soup squirt into your eye

Step 3

Slurp the soup out of the spoon and eat the dumpling. 

So good!

Next stop the observation deck at Taipei 101. To get to the top of the tower actually cost me more than my Michelin star meal, which was a little ridiculous. But the top of the tower was impressive. As we went up the elevator our ears popped twice. We were on the 91st floor, and there was still 10 more to the top. You can see how much the rest of the city is dwarfed by it, and how far Taipei sprawls out. 

After leaving Taipei 101 we briefly saw some dragon dancers at the entrance of the tower, we only caught the end of the show before they concluded. 

Our next stop of the day was the mountains that surround the city and the tea houses and plantations on them. From here we got beautiful views of the country side and the city. We tried some of the tea which was supposed to be world famous. It didn't taste that different from other tea's I've had, but then again I'm not a tea connoisseur. 

In the distance you can see Taipei 101, where we were earlier.

The view from our tea house

We took a bus down the mountain, which was awful and windy. But the time we got back it was dark. We headed out for dinner and ended up at a sushi restaurant, not exactly Taiwanese, but it hit the spot. After we sought out a bookstore which has several floors, apparently its 24 hours (although it closed down several floors while we were there, Chinese New Year?) and has a huge variety of books in english. As teacher we were excited. I bought several art books to add to my collection all on asian art, an area in my collection of 70-odd books is lacking. 

We finally got back to the hostel and went to bed, excited to see what the city would be like the next day when everything would be open after the new year.

Taipei Day 1

On Thursday we left after school to head to Manila for our flight to Taipei. We arrived around 1am on friday, changed our money, where I left my bag, got in the ridiculously long line for the cab, when I realized I had left my suitcase behind. Then began the search for a security guard who spoke english who could let me back into the arrival area to retrieve my lost bag which was only a mer twenty feet from the door. It took a while, but it happened. And I celebrated in the airport, there were a lot of Taiwanese people looking at me funny, I didn't care I was just excited that they hadn't thought my suitcase was a bomb and disposed of it.

So we were off to a rough start, we got to our hotel room for the first night around 3am. After what seemed like far too short of a sleep we had breakfast, the fanciest shower ever (there was steam and three different shower heads) and then checked out. For the next two nights we would be staying at a hostel just a couple of block away. We dropped off our luggage where we were informed that our original plans for the day were not possible because of Chinese New Year. As it turned out most things would be closed on that day. But luckily all national museums and parks would be open, so onto what was supposed to be day 2 of our itinerary!

First stop the National Palace Museum, we learned about jade carving and the importance of it in ancient Chinese culture. Saw a bunch of jade carvings, paintings and ceramics. I was happy.

Before heading into the Museum 

There were no photographs allowed in the museum, but needless to say things were impressive and some of it a little strange. Is it odd that one of their national treasures is a carved cabbage out of jade? Yes. But its really well carved. 

Next up was Jiufen a small coastal town about an hour south of Taipei. We waited for the bus, found out we were waiting in the wrong location, went to the new one and then headed out on our way. 

We finally got the bus!

About an hour later...

The view at Jiufen

Market entrance

Peanut brittal ice cream wraps. They were amazing!

The best way to describe these is a Chinese version of a croissant 

Ice cream pancake

I'm not sure what these were, but they looked gross, they're some sort of steamed meat bun, we didn't try them.

Sweet and Sour Soup

Bitter Melon, I tried a bit of it in shake form, it was awful.

We visited a tea house where their basement was a ceramics studio

The garbage truck that magically goes through the narrow alleys with maybe only a foot of clearance on each side. People manage to get out of the way and the whole time it plays Beethoven.

The whole time there were fire crackers and small fireworks being set off. We head back to our hostel, explored the streets around it. It was odd that the streets were practically empty. In Taiwan Chinese New Year is often spent with family and is done with quiet intimate celebrations. We called it a night and were excited to see what the next day would bring.