第四日

First of all I really want to apologize for not updating this thing on time ever, I'm terrible at deadlines in the best of circumstances and while this is an awesome circumstance it's not one that's terrible conducive to spending an hour making a blog post. I will try to catch up and stay caught!

A free day! No classes, no plans, no grad students. What's a group of undergrads to do? Catch the first train out to Danshui, of course! Or at least that's what we did.

Welcome to fabulous Danshui!

See! The fishing stoves!

Experience! The bangin graffiti!

Fear! The wrath of anime Poseidon!

Danshui was a pretty cute town, it's at the very edges of what people still consider Taipei, the last MRT stop. Made quite a dent on my Easycard, but I'd say it was well worth it. Being outside of the main city limits meant we, with our strange pale skin and wide dog eyes, were an anomaly not to be missed by the schoolchildren!
These young ladies followed us for about a block before throwin out their bravest "HELLO"s and holding up their cameras, smiling and nodding. We obliged, of course (so smug right now). It'll be weird to be back in the states, being ignored by kindergartners.
Oh yeah we also went to some fort buuuut. I've done more interesting things in my life. Ha, one cool thing was we paid with 7-11 receipts! I'm sure the poor guy was just dying to tell us about how there's a national lottery using the numbers on the receipts so businesses collect them and try to win in his broken English but he missed his shot. We found out later from some other people.

Lunch! Squid-ink spaghetti: black teeth, but worth it.

We still had some time to burn so we moseyed through the shopping district. It was pretty cool to begin with, but it was quickly made cooler by a temple we found hidden among some shady-looking meat booths in a back alley. It was pretty surreal, just walkin through the chicken heads and BAM temple. Now as I've probably already said, temples are not generally a thing that I enjoy, but check out some of these guys.

Awesome!The day still being young, we hopped on the MRT to Beitou for some hot spring action. Now I'm not sure what kind of magical chemical reactions are going on under the ground but they are not exaggerating when they call these springs the hottest thing ever. Actually nobody except me calls it that, but boy were our feet an angry color of red the rest of the day!We tried to find some legit whole-body hot springs, too, but instead got hopelessly lost, which was also fun! Everybody was so incredibly helpful - shoutout to my boy Mike at the hotel and the lady going for a walk with her kids who walked with us for 20 minutes. There are countless examples of people going out of their way to help these touristy 美国人 everywhere we go, it's so great!

Remember everyone: