Spirited Away to KTV

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to update the blog since it has been so long. I have to parts since there has been a lot going on. For one, the cold season is now over. I still have a stuffed up nose but it's been worse.

It feels as though my stay is half way through. I need to extend my visa with Amy for another 90 days since Taiwan gave me a 90 day extendable visa.

Today is the 10 of October, which means the 100th anniversary for Taiwan! It's a National Day with a big parade. I will go to see the fireworks tonight with my school friends. I decided to stay in and do laundry and study in the mean time.

As for the past week or so. My friends have been coming and going. Two just left. One to Hong Kong and another back to Austria right around Salz-burg. I had asked her if she liked the Sound of Music and she told me she had not seen it but that everyone asked her this. I made her promise to watch it soon!

Back to the story, my friend from Austria wanted to go to Jiefun this week. http://wikitravel.org/en/Jiufen
The town is on the eastern coast of Taiwan so I had a first sight of the ocean on the eastern side from the mountains that the well known movie Spirited Away took place at. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirited_Away

I found this to be very exciting because I saw the movie a few times and the place is very traditional. The roads are lined with red lanterns and shops with trinkets of all sorts. We all ate outside at a very nice restaurant that I put a picture of on here. We went in the afternoon to see the shops while they were still open and the spectacular view and then the lanterns were lit as it got dark.

Earlier in the week, I was at KTV with my friends and with Laura's co-worker from Taiwan. It was my first time at a Karaoke. The building itself was a tall skyscraper in the hub of Ximending night market. We were on the 9th floor, lined with rooms that looked like a hotel. The lobby of our floor had an all you can eat buffet and we ate a lot and sang a lot. I think it was very cool because we had people from everywhere so we could sing in English, Chinese, and Japanese. I could read some of the Chinese so I sang along to Jay Chou and Show Lou. But we all sang "We are the World" because it was appropriate. We were Austrian, Italian, Australian, American, Japanese and Taiwanese all in the same room :)