More misadventures in and out of JhuShan Town

So once again I decided to forgo the lure of bigger cities to spend this weekend in JhuShan. I got a very romaticized idea of riding into the mountains early Sunday morning to watch the sunrise. The plan was to go to bed early Saturday night and then get up at 2.30 and jump on a bike and start the journey topside. There were a few hitches, firstly the whole going to bed early thing didn't take. I was in bed around 8pm, but after an hour of tossing and turning I decided to get up and muck around for a bit longer. I finally crawled back into bed at 12.30...still early by my standards but cosidering the early start not nearly early enough. The second problem was that I wasn't sure how to get back to the path I discovered last week, however it turns out my navigation skills are better than I thought and I found it quite quickly. I left on schedule and everything was going great actually it was going too good. I got higher a lot faster than I expected although my body cried for rest and quite a few parts of the ascent was done pushing the bike as the gradient was too steep for my sleep deprived body.

I ended up resting in a spot for about 30 minutes. It wasn't a particularly beautiful spot plus it was still very much night so there wasn't much to see anyway. For a while it was quite nice...then my arachnophobia got the better of me and the idea of sitting in a forest type area for another 2 or so hours waiting for the sun to rise became a lot less appealing. I started moving up again but the woods got denser and the street lights became more spaced out. Finally the sighting of a snake made me doubt my ability to stay there for too long and I decided that the sunrise would be just as nice down near my apartment. The descent was a lot quicker than the ascent. Stupidly quick in fact despite the fact I spent half the time using my brakes just to slow down a bit. While the bike was more of a liability on the way up I was glad of it on the way down. After making it back to the main road I enjoyed the quiet of the night and decided to keep exploring (though this time I stuck to flatter roads).

I ended up riding south out of JhuShan and even made it into a different county (Yunlin county) I also got chased by two dogs not once but twice. I spent a good hour or so just riding around. Just after 5 I got back to the 'welcome to JhuShan' sign and decided to stop there to watch the sunrise. Unfortunately the cloud cover was such that there really wasn't much of a sunrise (good thing I didn't stay in the mountains I would have been totally annoyed). I decided to grab some breakfast on my way home. JhuShan started coming alive just before 6am.

After about 30 minutes of watching people start their day I headed to McDonalds in search of a mcmuffin only to be side tracked by their hot cakes. Now normally I am anti-McDs but in Taiwan it is totally different. Firstly there is a lot of oil in most Taiwan food so McD's in not necessarily the uber-unhealthy choice as it is in Australia. Also they have pictures of their food which makes it easy to order food without having to speak chinese. Plus this was my first time in a McDs in Taiwan so I don't feel so bad. Their hot cakes were great and for some reason they serve them with sausage as well....odd but nice seperated. They also gave me an English newspaper to read while I was eating.

So anyway I finally made it back to the apartment and was too wired to sleep so I ended up watching the 2nd US presidential election debate, which put me in a nice coma so I headed to bed for an hours nap.

I had nothing planned for the afternoon so I just grabbed the guitar and was strumming away when my phone went off. It was a number I wasn't familiar with but with nothing to lose I answered it.

It turned out to be the sister of one of my students who is going to be sitting her GEPT next Saturday and was looking for someone to help her practice. As I had nothing better to do I helped her out via phone and then went to meet up...amazingly enough she chose McDs as the meetup lol twice in one day!

The girl was good, her sentence problem is a problem and I have doubts about her ability to pass although hopefully she will get through. I've arranged to meet her as many times this week as possible and we're also gonna use her brother as a gopher to do written work.

I'm excited to have a project outside of school, I hear often of foreign teachers getting approached to do tutoring work but due to the fact I look local I didn't really expect to be given that chance.

So yeah it's been an interesting day.