Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

May 07 2001

Another good weekend. The weather now is quite hot…

Another good weekend. The weather now is quite hot and summerlike, and it may just be here to stay this time. I went hiking with a friend in the hills near the Chingmei stop of the Hsintien MRT line. I had never been there before, but it seemed like quite a nice place. Relatively remote, in that there were the mountains and some semi-fresh air in the vicinity, but with a movie theater and some places to eat. I wonder what it would cost to live out there and what it would be like.

The hike was a good, easy one, but the weather was cloudy so the views of the city weren’t great. I snapped a few pictures of a gecko with a strange-looking head(undiscovered species or just your run-of-the-mill waste-induced mutation?) and we descended on the other side of the mountain through a posh, recently opened apartment complex. Most of the rooms looked empty, even though my friend pointed out that the ghost money burner on one of the balconies was already in place.

Yesterday I had planned to get up early and go to sword practice, but when I got there nobody from my class was there, so I went to the beach again, since it was so fun last time, but yesterday, while tempting us with sun in the morning, turned cloudy by the time we got there. We swam a bit and then went to the hot springs at Mazu Keng(see my article on this place in the writing section). There were lots of people there and even more mosquitoes. I had elected to take the MRT to Tamshui again, but my friend Harry took me back to Taipei on the back of his scooter. I hate riding on the back of scooters. After a while I can’t feel my behind, although it is probably good for my physique as it feels like I am in the middle of a perpetual sit-up the whole way.

The book I am reading now, Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, is a happy travel book, one of my favorite kinds of book. A good author can make you look up from your reading and look at your own world with different eyes, and Theroux is just such a writer.

posted by Poagao at 6:23 am  

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