hotpot, hot springs and hot photos

So last weekend I have been to a hotpot restaurant with my Taiwanese friend Bonita and two other of her friends. As the name might indicate, you get a pot with boiling water in the middle of your table and then massive loads of food, that you can then put in the boiling water! It was a bit spicy for me, but as I'm planning to go to India as my next big travel project and heard that the food there is crazily spicy, I usually feel that I should go for all the spicy stuff as a kind of preparation :D And you know, "pain is just weakness leaving the body!"


Same night I also went to a Karaoke place again, what was really funny. I was completely sober (recently I seriously think about completely stopping drinking alcohol...) but the guy next to me was drunk as hell and just watching him, eating some melon or a chicken leg - closed eyes, 100% focus on this one task - was really entertaining. The two of us also ended up singing the Beatles "Yesterday" three times together! And over time I can tell our singing improved from a really, really horrible level to a really horrible level if not even more :D


And to hot springs I've even been twice recently. Last weekend I went to Wulai, a place not too far from Taipei, thereby having my first scooter drive here in Taiwan (yay!). For my friend this was probably also his first scooterride having armrests (my legs at his side) -.-

Wulai

There, as my Taiwanese friend Lee Johann Gemüsemann told me, some pensioners, nothing to do all day long, had decided to build up a hotspring area which is free. In contrast to all the other commercial hotspring places I'd been to so far, this place it seemed was build with the stuff the old people had found in there garages - and with lots of creativity. The sauna for example, looked like one of those slum buildings, made of plastic covers and inside people were splashing some hot spring water on the walls so that the evaporating steam made up the sauna. Awesome!

the thing on the right is the sauna!

An other interesting attraction was a pool, located right between the river (cold) and a natural hotspring (extremely hot) and connected to both. So depending on the streaming water, the temperature in this pool was a gamble, changing every moment from "a bit cold", to "aaaw - perfect", to "FUCK THIS IS HOT!!!". In the last case, the only thing you could do was to stir the water with your hands like a manic to mix the hot one with the cold water from the river.

This one! hotspring on the right, river on the left

Me and someone drowning in the background ;-)

An other weird situation there was when I bought a package of ready-cut pineapples from a local streetvendor. Taking in the first slice though, I found that it tasted pretty salty and eventually got to know that Taiwanese vendors sometimes use to wash the cut slices in saltwater to stop the oxidation process and to preserv the fresh color... seriously?! :-/

Waterfall in Wulai, one of many

Now I've covered hotpot and hot springs and with "hot photos" I'm just refering to a pretty cool National Geographic exhibition that I had been to with Anker. Not what you might think, pervert!
(just wanted a third term that begins with hot...)

one of their most famous photographs

The exhibiton was really cool, some stunning photographs deeply moving me. Live on earth can be just so beautiful.
The area where the exhibiton took place, was like a little Berlin actually. With lots of arts stuff, tiny cafes and creative shops.

What is going on here? I know, but I don't tell you! :-P

Finally on Wednesday I've been clubbing again. And this time even to two clubs in one night - Lihong in beastmode!
(This one was for you, Jiaxiasha!)
And I just thought that so far I haven't really written about the actual clubbing experience here in Taiwan compared to Germany - so thats what I'm gonna do now:
Firstly the clubs I've been to were rather fancy and expensive with cover charges around 15€. While the general clubbing experience is not so different to Germany (dancing people, music too loud...) whats different though is that here the female guests show active interest in me :D
For example on Wednesday: I just arrived at the club with some friends, walked to the dance floor area where immediately a girl approaches me "Hey, you've also been at Myst (a club) last week, right? Whats your name?", while from the other side a girl is touching my arm to softly pull me to the circle of her friends. Awesome!
However, all this usually makes me become a bit overconfident and then I usually end up going home alone
Maybe there's some flaw in my strategy... :D
However, some of the other guys here in the dorm are really... well let's use the neutral term "going for it" ;-)
For example this badass:

just kidding, Katha ;-)

And yesterday I went hiking with Lee Johann again at Yangmingshan. He had told me that for the hike we could meet up with some friends of him and this turned out to be a 30 man travel club :D
Unfortunately, I had done lots of sports just the day before after not exercising in the last weeks, so that my muscels were soring really badly. Moreover I was somehow super tired and therefore could't enjoy the hike too much... BUT afterwards we went to a local hotspring place which was aaawesome! Lots of different pools of varying temperature, water jets for massaging your back and very shallow pools for lying/sleeping there. Soooo relaxing!

steam from a natural hot spring

my hiking group

So, thats it!

on top of Taipei 101, extreme-hiking and partyparty!

It's time for an other post!

So last Friday we had some pretty awesome sunny weather, so Anker and me thought it to be a good idea to make a biketour to the citycenter. There, catching sight of Taipei 101's gigantic architecture we spontaneously decided, "yeah ... lets go up!!!"
And it was extremely cool on top. Up to a few years ago it was still the tallest building on earth - and you know my motto: the taller, the better ;-)
Check out the pictures:

on top of the world!

Babam!

the wind blowing through this metal fance actually made a pretty fancy melodious tone. What a cool little feature!

I'll definitely go up again before leaving Taiwan. Sooo impressive!

An other evening, Anker and me did some random sightseeing - just taking the metro to a random station and walking around at night. At some point around midnight, we decided to take a taxi back to the dorm and trying to fnd one, we managed to walk over a 1km long bridge instead^^
And on the other side, we had ended up at the probably single place in Taipei, where there were no taxis coming by... huge fail!

waiting at this pleasant bench about 15min for a taxi :D

However after walking some more and finally getting a driver I had an other of these situations that make me love the Taiwanese people:
During our ride home, we noticed that the taxi driver had accidentally taken a wrong way. Anker and me where already a bit annoyed that this would make us pay more and that we could hardly complain about it because of our lacking Chinese skills. However when we arrived, the driver apologized from his own initiative and gave us about 40% discount on the price, what left us way better off, than if he had taken the right way in the first place! Taiwanese taxidrivers are the best! :D

Last week with a Taiwanese friend I have also been to Danshui, a coastal town close to Taipei. My favorite thing there was one of these Turkish ice-cream places where the vendor is playing pranks with the people when they want to take the waffle from his hand. He had the most whimsical grin you could imagine. His mouth was a bit skewed from the 20 years of grinning while doing those pranks (thats what I guessed at least :D ) Here I found him on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu8kN-jHBl8

In Danshui with my Taiwanese friend Polly

An other highlight of last week was a pretty extreme hike on Sunday - definitely the most intense I've ever done.

my Taiwanese friend Lee Johann Gemüsemann - awesome name!

it was recommended to wear gloves because of all the ropes there

rockriding

However, I had slept rather bad the night before and after the 5h hike I was completely dead. Even though the hike is about 1h away from Taipei city I was seriously considering to take a taxi back to my dorm (instead of public transport) jut to get in bed quicker^^

some more impressions:

rainbow!

And I've finally been partying again twice in the last days! To two pretty fancy clubs, Luxy and Myst. One had a 20€ cover charge but they had quite a lasershow there.
The next morning though I woke up with a mild hearing damage... Why does the music in clubs always have to be so fucking loud?! I'll probably buy one of those special earplugs for concerts that just decrease the overall loudness before going out next time... :-/

Lastly some stuff about my courses. to be upfront, the current situation is pretty disappointing (This here might sound like an other episode of "Lino klagt" ;-) ).
So, apart from my Chinese class by now I'm only left with one other economics class. I had started with 3 more classes but had to drop one after an other for various good reasons. And there were just no decent alternatives because there are not too many graduate classes offered in English.
So besides Chinese, the only course left is Applied Macroeconomics and now I am extremely close to dropping this as well -.-

We had a midterm assignment due to last Wednesday and were supposed to use the program Matlab to simulate a macroeconomic economy. The problem beeing however that I've never worked with this program let alone any other comparable program and that the professor had only given us a supershort introduction in the first lecture like how to calculate plus and minus. After the professors email support beeing a one-sentence answer to a 4-question email, massively frustrated I had finally written the professor an email about my frustration about the midterm (in a quite dimplomatic tone though of course) only to find out in the next lecture that he had taken this as a personal insult and was kindof attacking me what my problem is... yay
I guess this won't have a very positive influence on my final grade...
Now also take into account that from about 12 people that had started the course, we are by now only 6 left with an other girl in exact the same situation as me. This might be due to the hard to top dullness of the lecture style. The professor just writing complicated formulas on the board for 3h straight (and in a 6 people class, you have to pretend attention of course -.-). And lastly regarding the contents I could hardly be less interested. Its again one of those completely unworldy mathematic model courses that make me too often think that I sometimes really hate economics. I feel that I'm learning nothing about how the real world economy works and instead loose with every single lecture just 3 more hours of my life.
On the other hand though, if I drop that class, I could focus 100% on studying chinese, what I would have planned to do anyway sometime in the near future...
But well, I'll decide on this matter in the next days when we hopefully get the midterm results.
And on this bombshell... ;-)

Buddhism/meditation, ice skating and hiking around Taipei

A few posts ago I mentioned that I had been to a meditation class, where a guy told me about a German Buddhist nun around Taipei that I could met up with if I would be interested to learn more about Buddhism.
So two weeks ago I managed to do just that:
After getting in touch via email with "Simplicity", she invited me to the monastery where she's living, up in the mountains around Taipei. It took quite a while to get there - including a good hike where I got to see some nice nature. There, as all Buddhist nuns shave their head, to be honest it was a bit weird for me at first to talk to a woman with a bald head. But she was very nice and told me a lot about the general philosophy of Buddhism and answered my questions. I was also invited for lunch and got a book about Buddhism from her and finally she also invited me to some other upcoming events at that monastery that are free for visitors - a meditation class and a meditation retreat.
So I decided to sign up for the meditation class, where I've been last Sunday. Together with about 100 other people we meditated together and then heard a lecture by the abbess about Buddhism. All in all it was a very interesting experience - only the abbess 2h lecture was a bit lenghty ;-)
So after these experiences and also some reading in the book, I came to some conclusions about Buddhism for me. As you can take Buddhism as something between a life philosophy and a religion, I'd say that I definitely find some of the philosophical ideas very appealing, for instance that you are not your ego, that most cravings ultimately lead to suffering and the practice of learning to control your mind through meditation. However some of the religious elements seem quite bizarre to me, like the rebirth cycle (including ghosts, gods and heaven/hell) and some other elements that seem to me a bit dogmatic.
I will definitely read and think some more about Buddhism and will probably also visit Simplicity again in the next time but it seems I'll have to stay an Agnostic-Atheist ;-)

And besides the Buddhism aspect, some of you might wonder, why I've actually started getting into meditation after all...
So for a good while I'm following a bunch of interesting/inspiring blogs and websites (namely this, this, this and this) and by the time beeing, all of them have brought forward the practice of meditation as a means to cultivate well-being, health, self-awareness and mindfulness (like this post). So I came to think I should give it a try sometime. As I'm still a beginner I find it hard to write about my experiences so far, but I might write about this in upcoming posts. So far the crosslegged sitting fucks me up - I'm horribly unstretched...

However after that meditation event, as I had already been in the mountains, I thought I should go for some hiking there. And there I saw a snake! First I've ever seen in wildlife - and to spice it up, the snake had a big frog in its mouth! :D

there's a snake hidden somewhere in this picture! Unfortunately even I can't find it now -.-

Unfortunately this was the queue for the bus I needed to get back to Taipei. I had to wait for more than an hour -.-

On Sunday I did some more sightseeing with a Taiwanese friend. We went hiking on the Elephant Mountain which is close to the city center and offers a nice view over the city. Later together with an other friend we drove to a cool place at the coast. Here are some pictures:

Taipei - babam!

These cute girls are actually praying for finding a boyfriend/partner. That temple is famous for this matter :D

Chinese tourist group. And yes, they are following a guy in a suit carrying a Spongebob :D
#Spongebobrulz

Cape Yehliu!

my Taiwanese friends that took me around

this "queen" is a very famous sight

Whatsmore on Thursday I went Ice-skating with Jiaxiasha and some of his friends which was really fun! I haven't been for years...
Later that day, Sascha and me went to the bar/club Brass Monkey. We had been warned that there would only be old western guys looking for Taiwanese girls but thought that it could not be that bad. However, when we arrived there were in total only about 5 girls and around 30 old (and probably horny) guys. After first thinking about leaving right away we decided to stay a bit longer and luckily, as it was ladies night, the male/female ratio improved gradually and after all it was quite a fun night there.
By now I've already been to three clubs here in only about 2 months - I'm such a party beast!^^

Ice-Skating with Sascha, full-geared :D

Lihong demonstrating his grace!

Asian style desert: green-tea-ice with beans on crushed ice (yes, beans is a thing for desert here)

Brotzeit! I'd call this a feast! :D

lots of sushi! mjumjumjum! And surprisingly the choice of vegetarian stuff was very satisfying.

Some last things:
Yesterday I somehow managed to not notice a major earthquake -.- (here's a news post about it). I'd been in a park and when I got back to the dorms, everyone was excited about the earthquake that I had somehow missed -.- I hope another one is coming soon ;-) wanna see how it feels like.

My Chinese is getting better and better. Had Chinese midterms this week and it went quite well.

During the last weeks I had become addicted to the tablet mini game of candy crush on Ankers Tablet and last week I've successfully managed to overcome my addiction by fixing 2000NT$ (~50€) on my wall and telling Anker those are his if I'd ever play that game again :D
(I was a bit inspired by this)