Day 1 Complete!

good morning from kaohsiung, taiwan!!! it's FINALLY day two here, seeing as day one was a full 48 hours from morning to actual BED... never felt so good to sleep in a bed. after sitting on a plane for about 20 hours + the lay over times, we lost one whole day. never saw thursday may 13, 2010. weird feeling. it was amazing when we finally stepped outside and breathed in fresh air again. granted, it was more like breathing in a sauna, but nonetheless it was fresh air we hadn't had in quite some time.

so our first flight out of atlanta to san francisco was pretty lame. delta has gotten super stingy. we all had mini screens set into the headrest in front of us, but every movie was 6 bucks!free, but you all know how much i loooooove tv. i skimmed through the channels for a bit before napping for round 1. the flight out of san fran did have movies playing, however the screen (not plural) was pretty dinky. so no movies for me :( so sad. oh well. i slept most of the time anyways. the final flight was the best though. by the time we got in the air from taipei we were already landing maybe 20 minutes later. it was like it never even happened jaja!

so now we were finally at our destination in kaohsiung about 24 hours later. merely stepping off the plain gave you the full sauna effect. and amazingly, it hasn't made me sweaty and/or itchy!! it's the second largest city in taiwan with one of the worlds largest shopping malls... complete with ferris wheel jajaja! but the most ridiculous thing is how many scooters there are! they are EVERYWHERE!! there have to be thousands even millions of them! everyone is driving around on them, fully covered, wearing face masks to protect them from all the fumes. it's pretty smoggy, but they do have a ton of green spaces in hopes of offsetting the pollution. i just can't believe they can stand the heat with all their clothes on! protecting your skin and trying to keep you skin tone light is one thing, but there's a limit when it comes to comfort! i couldn't do it.

we hit the ground running though after we dropped our luggage in the hotel we stayed in for the night (we leave for the university around 9 this morning). our first stop was lunch. tin-man got us a huuuuuge spread of food to try from, and EVERYTHING was delicious! you can see in the pictures how hungry we all were too. from there we just walked and walked and walked. it didn't seem like we had been walking that long or that far on the way FROM the hotel, but by the time we were walking back it seemed like we would never reach our destination! i felt near delirium from the lack of sleep and obvious jet lag. but it was super fun anyways!

we walked along the river and went to a couple museums that were super cute. everyone and everything here is sooooo adorable!!! we've already had what seemed to be a group of middle school girls come up giggling and ask for pictures with us. too cute!! oh and i became mayor of kaohsiung for a minute in the interactive portion of the museum :)

of course i've already made some incredible purchases!! got a new battery for my watch for only 100 nt or apx $3 (yes mom it wasn't working after all... never really thought to check until my phone wasn't working so well jaja). i've gotten some milk tea (amazing!!) and strawberry milk tea as well (my dinner since it was too tired to even be hungry). and of course the most amazing purchase of all was my helmet!!! it's definitely intended for scooters, but i plan to use it for stylishly riding my bike!! and one day if i do get a scooter in the states i'll be prepared... jayson you're totally gonna be jealous. soooo much cooler than your scooter helmet! it's the face of hello kitty. adorable. as you can see in the picture. we (or should i say tin-man's wife) haggled with the woman selling in for about 1o minutes trying to get her to drop the price... not like it was expensive to start with (only 320 nt/$10!!), but it was super fun just haggling with her!

we also went to the night market for a bit! all kinds of neat stuff, but sadly i'm either too tall and/or too busty for all their clothes. oh well. maybe they'll have a 'big and tall' store somewhere jajaja! i really wasn't even that interested in shopping by the time we got there though... at this point we were all just zombie walking from one booth to the next.

when we finally got back to the hotel i took my second shower for the day. it's not so much that you get sweaty here, but i definitely felt sticky. a cool shower definitely felt relaxing. hit the sack by 9 o'clock, and here i am at 6:30 am posting what we've done. it was a long 48 hour day, and now it's time for breakfast!!