Teapot Mountain Hike

Saturday January 19^th, 2013

This post will be nice and short with get to the point details.

The plan for today was to go hiking to a place called “Mt. Teapot.” Our group, consisting of eight people, met up at our church and rode two buses to the location. Beginning the climb up the stairs I sure felt the burn from past butt and thigh exercises I’ve been doing in my room. Uh oh. XD A little whiles up the stairs Leo, a church friend, said we finished the first and easiest part of the hike. It made several of us worry since we were already running out of breath (thank Taiwan for making us out of shape XD). But Ellie, the German exchange student, had some serious health problems so we rested for a while. Some time later she still was doing pretty bad so we decided to slowly go back down and find a restaurant for her to eat food.

This would be Teapot Mountain. It's named so for a reason. See why? :)

Our hiking group for the day (plus Leo who was taking pictures)!

Since this place was high in the mountains there weren’t many places for a bite to eat. Thankfully we found a quaint little café run by one man. Here we had a lovely late lunch and a nice drink. Four girls, me being one of them, chose orange juice. It wasn’t just any orange juice but fresh squeezed. I could watch the man squeezing the oranges in the kitchen. It was just that fresh! That must have been one of the best orange juices I’ve ever had! Definitely the best in Taiwan!

My main dish, chicken curry yumminess! (non spicy)

Everyone posing in a Taiwanese manner

Just in time, and with a short run, we caught the sun setting. Time was taken to watch its beauty and take lots of pictures. Behold…

Afterwards it was back to Taipei on an extremely bumpy and fast bus, which isn’t a reassuring combination on narrow roads swerving through the mountain edge. I won’t go explaining it but basically I paid double (about $7.20US) for the bus fair because of the weird system it had. Andrea was so not happy and keeps her mind off of it so to not get upset. (Andrea really doesn’t like wasting money)

Then we all took another bus to go eat at a favorite place of Leo and Kelly. It had “guan bao” which was described to me as an Asian Mexican taco (it’s not :P). When I saw it I froze in fear. It was the food I had once before and I dubbed it my least liked food in all of Taiwan. Nonetheless I gave it a second shot because Kelly said that this little food shop are the only ones with good ‘guan baos.’ One ‘lean meat guan bao’ later, my hope was renewed in the food. It was a good amount of meat too it, which my past experience completely lacked. But yes I actually did like tonight’s version.

Overall today was pretty good. No regrets but more exercise would have been nice.

Sorry this post is so lack luster. I’m falling behind on Taffy badly with various resources declining rapidly. My enthusiasm for it is downgraded to spitting something out in attempt to reduce stress. So yeah. Sleep well guys.