Well my classes are starting to get harder still and my group projects are picking up, so it’s hard to find time to sit down and tell my new stories. So to get things going, since I have been living here in the Prince Int'l Housing, I have seen some "white guys" with a European accent I could not distinguish and each time we passed one another we always said hey, but kept walking or w/e we were doing at the time. So a couple weeks ago, pretty much after my last blog post, I went to my Wednesday night soccer practices and saw the guys from the dorm and finally introduced myself since it gave me an easy ice breaker "hey, don't yall live in the Prince dorm". So I was talking to Tony and Ulle and they are on a 4 month exchange program for Architecture (from North Italy, where they speak more German than Italian) and they were planning to cook a nice traditional Italian dinner for their friends here and invited me to join. Tony called me the next day to let me know they were cooking that night at the dorm kitchen (our kitchen is located on the roof of our dorm) around 9pm whenever I finished working out and had time to come up. When I arrived, I was greeted with a warm welcome and I met Penny (local Taiwanese girl), Mathieu from France who speaks great Chinese and a couple other languages, Alessiandro from Italy just visiting for a couple weeks and recently just left for home 2 days ago (Oct. 15th) and a few other local Taiwanese friends Tony and Ulle had met will being here. Alessiandro is a really funny guy and loves to wear the traditional Chinese handmade shirts and act like he knows Kung Fu. The guys ended up cooking an unbelievable large amount of pasta with tuna and a light sauce. it was very delicious and then came more food consisting of a fresh salad with peppers, olive oil, and some other veggies. The guys love to cook and hopefully we will have more of these cookouts.
So the next night I had asked Tony and Ulle to come hang out with some friends, so we met up at the "country club" and waited for Sander and Maria to call and meet them at a restaurant/bar. We got the call and found out it was too far to walk, so Tribuu (from Estonia who speaks 8 or 9 languages, and Tony/Ulle did not believe me until they met her and she knew all there languages plus about 5 others. haha) had her friend named Power from Nigeria, who I just happened to have met before at soccer practice, come pick us up and take us to the Taiwanese restaurant/bar during the night to meet up with their group and enjoy a few beers. It was a relaxing atmosphere and just a good chance to talk with everyone, until we went to the Orient club and danced for the rest of the night and headed back home for bed.
My Green Island Scuba trip was only 2 weeks away and you would think an awesome trip your looking forward to would seem to take forever to come up, but it was just the opposite and I was packing my bags before I knew it. Not to jump ahead to quick, to fill in the last two weeks, I had bought a scooter from a guy I met at soccer who is one of the head guys there, so the two weeks consisted of my normal class schedule and then meeting Erik at the DMV to have the titles transferred and the "ORY" put into my name. It did not go as smoothly as I planned b/c Erik forgot to bring his ARC and passport so we had to plan another time to meet. Before we left, we went to get the ORY inspected which was a requirement to have insurance put on the scooter. We met up a few days later and completed the transfer and I am now officially the owner of a 125cc 1997 Yamaha scooter. Yea don't be too impressed with the name b/c it really needs a lot of work, but I got a good price and now attached. Once again my good friend Anthony from Malaysia offered to be my translator to go to a local scooter shop where I had the oil changed and a new spark plug that seemed to improve the performance of my delicate machine. haha The engine still needs a tune up and my right mirror is about to fall off, but it just adds character to her and the risk of being blindsided. (don’t worry I’ll get it fixed soon). So that’s enough about the time before the trip so here it goes.
I had my bags packed and walked to the IIMBA office to meet Raquel (my friend I met on Facebook before I came here). I showed up a few minutes early as I normally would for a meeting to realize, I was supposed to drive my scooter to follower her where we were to meet Greg (our dive master) and catch a ride in his van to TaiTung. So I went from relaxed and calm, to sprinting back to the dorm to get my scooter key, sweating, praying the scooter would start, and make it back to campus to meet with Raquel. haha it’s funny now that I look at it, but at the moment it was very frustrating. So we finally meet up with Greg and his g/f or wife I’m not sure, and then to French guys Pierre and Roland who is 100% Chinese, but raised in France so he has a French accent. I just thought it was different to expect to hear Chinese or broken English and then a French accent comes out. haha that just goes to show, you should not judge or assume things about people. It was about 10:20pm when we finally got on the road and it was about a 4hr trip to make it to Taitung where we had a home stay for the night. I think the trip should have taken about 6hrs, but I think Greg would have a great career as in Ambulance driver. The driving rules are not very strict here in Taiwan and if we would have driven the same way in the U.S. I think we would have quickly had a police helicopter flying overhead and a new episode of COPS. I was white knuckled the whole ride while Raquel slept like a baby. We arrived sometime after 2am to our home stay that was 500NT $15US for the night, but a really nice place. You can all see the pics on the slideshow when I get them posted. We had to wake up at 5:30am to get everything together, eat a light breakfast and drive to the port to catch the fairy/boat to Green Island. The sunrise was so pretty that first morning and I believe everyone will agree from the pictures. So before I left for the trip I have heard nothing but terrible things about the boat ride to Green Island and everyone I talked to said they were puking and it was the worst 1 hr ride of their life. To prepare for this I took my motion sickness pills when I first woke up so getting on the boat at 7am gave it time to kick in. The boat took off jumping across the waves and I was just waiting to start feeling nauseated. I was extremely tired from working the 8am shift Thursday morning and the next day waking up at 5:30am with only 3hrs of sleep only added on. I felt my eye lids touching and before I knew it, I was waking up as the boat pulled into the Green Island port feeling refreshed and amazed that it was an easy boat ride after all for me even though many people did get sick.
We loaded our gear on the dive shops truck and waited for another one to pick us up and take us to our new home stays for the weekend. The package included a 125cc scooter for 2 people to share, and I had no idea that scooters could run as good as this one did. Since I only had the experience of the ORY, the scooter was amazing and so much fun to ride. We dropped our stuff off in our room and headed back to the dive shop where we loaded our dive gear on the truck and drove the scooters about 8mins to our dive boat. We were about to be out on the water by around 11am to start our two dives. I can't remember all the dive sites but I’ll just list a few (chicken head, The giant mushroom, chicken feet I think was another one), anyways all of our dives for the trip were relatively close to each other, but contained so many different scenic views where some had man-made reefs with large steel frames, huge coral reefs and crevasses formed by the volcanic island, and another man-made reef that consisted of hundreds of concrete cylinders that looked like linking-logs (the childhood blocks to build log cabins). My deepest dive was around 30m which is almost 100ft. I never had any problems equalizing/ clearing my ears which could have made the dives unbearable. I do need to work on my breathing pattern which will come with time, b/c after each dive I finished I had a slight headache that I was told can be caused by CO2 build up from skip-breathing (a term used in diving when your breathing is not fluent or natural or holding your breath just a sec between breaths if that makes any sense). The Island was beautiful and was created by Volcanic activity a long time ago. Green Island also has a famous prison that is no longer used, but it held political prisoners involved in corruption. To learn more about Green Island and the facts/history just visit www.greenislandadventure.com.tw, or google Green Island Taiwan.
After the 2nd day's first two morning boat dives, Raquel and I set out to drive around the Island (which only takes 30 mins non-stop by scooter) to take pictures and enjoy the beautiful scenic views and enjoy a nice small road trip. haha, I realized that every time I came to a point where we had to take a picture, I didn’t think I would see anything prettier, until we drove another 1/4 mile to see another shoreline with even prettier volcanic mountains jutting out of the ocean, more white beaches, and even greener trees. The pictures will explain things much better b/c I am at a loss of words to explain its beauty. There is a hot spring located on this island which is one of three salt water hot springs in the world. Another one is in Italy I think and the other is in Japan. The hottest pool they had, I could not even put my feet or hands in for more than a few seconds. It was amazing to see people sitting in it, especially when looking back at my pictures I took a pic of the sign explaining it and at 60Deg C or 140Deg F. You can boil eggs in this pool and is one of the attractions so I really don’t feel so bad when everyone laughed at me was I casually stepped in the pool and frantically jumped out with a little yelp. I was amazing to see that the human body can endure such extreme temperatures. I stuck with staying in the 40Deg C pool or 104Deg F that was something could relate to from back home. The cool sea breeze only about 200ft away made for an amazing place to relax. So the last day (Sunday) was a little rainy so it was cold to be out of the water which was around 86deg F. We were all exhausted after doing 7 dives in 3 days, one which was a night dive from the shore and a little scary (since I was scared to be pricked by the hundreds of sea urchins laying out at night. we did see a sea turtle at the end of our dive which made it all the better. So the boat ride back to main land was just as good for me, I slept the whole time and stayed awake for the ride back to keep Greg talking and awake and I was back in my dorm by 10pm Sunday night.
I had a group presentation the next morning at 9am for my IT PM class which just a project proposal. I felt like it went well and should be a good group I guys to work with. I guess the last thing to say in this blog is about my Chinese class yesterday. During our 5 min break I sat out on the balcony overlooking the campus that was being mowed and weedeated at the time. While closing my eyes, the smell of the fresh cut grass and sounds of weed eaters brought me back home for a few seconds until I realized it wasn't real. Because if I was really back home and hearing weed eaters, most likely it was in my hand and I would be sweating with grass and rocks flying back at my face which really isn’t a pleasant feeling. So I quickly snapped back to reality and laughed out loud at my own personal humor, but the smell of fresh cut grass is the same everywhere and is a great memory of home.
I hope everyone back home and reading this is doing great and feel free to email me anytime at www.logan.reittinger@gmail.com
Love Always,
Logan
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