May 10, Fu Long Beach

Hello world,

Today we took a buss to Fu long beach. On the way we stopped at a really fascinating town built into a steep hillside. We walked around as a group for about two hours exploring a random market at the top of the town, which was filled with some of the most dubious foods and smells imaginable. It was my first encounter with a local delicacy known as stinky tofu; a notorious kind of aged and fried tofu that, as its name implies, absolutely, completely, utterly, reeks. This point is worth emphasizing because every foreigner who goes to Taiwan will at some point encounter this and it will certainly stick with them. (I can still smell it)

After we left the town we drove for another half hour before arriving at the beach, where we had a traditional style boxed lunch. From there we split into two groups, one which was taking a bicycling tour and the other which was headed directly to the beach (after a stop at 711). I went with the group going directly to the beach. When we arrived our spirits were as high as they could possibly be. We sat down and immediately took over our little area of paradise with our high energy American attitude. The locals seemed to enjoy us though. We hadn’t been there long before people were coming over to take pictures with us, saying: “friends!”

After an hour or two of running about and soaking up the sun we played some drunken volley ball, which was a blast. The day stands out as my favorite thus far. It doesn’t get much better than bringing in six credit hours for relaxing on a beach in Taiwan.