Taiwan:
It’s so weird that this is one of the last blogs that I’m going to have on this ship. Classes are getting harder and we’ve all been crunching our homework in so we can spend more time together on the boat instead of apart. Apparently there was another earthquake in japan, and if we had gone, today would have been the last day we were there. It’s so sad that everything keeps getting destroyed. One day I’d really love to go and see it all, but it is probably going to be a bit different than how it was before the earthquakes.
Instead of going to japan, we went to Taiwan. The morning that we were getting off of the boat, no one knew what they were going to do or where they were going to go. My group of friends decided over breakfast that we were going to go to a place called Taroko gorge. There we would be able to hike, bike, lay on the beach, rent motorcycles, eat, go out, basically do whatever we wanted. Ashton and I got a call from adam and Andrew telling us to hurry up because we were leaving in five minutes, so we threw everything together and went to the gangway to meet up with them. Turns out, liz convinced ben and the boys to leave us. Missy came down the stairs, and the three of us decided we were going to go traveling Taiwan by ourselves and that we could have a girls vacation (because who needs boys anyways?! Haha!) we got to the ATM, got to the station, and then Andrew and adam saw us. They decided they wanted to come with us instead, but ben convinced the guys that they were going to have more fun going the three of them and liz. Andrew was mad because he wanted to travel with us (he and ashton are practically dating)but he went with the boys anyways. We ended up seeing another big group of SAS guys, and we decided to travel with them.  We all said to meet at a city called Hualien and get hotel rooms by the beach. We ran into the boys and liz again, and they decided this time to come with us, and liz went with another group of people that she ran into. The six of us split up from the group of kids we were traveling with because we had different tickets, so it was the six of us, all best friends, traveling Taiwan together how we had originally planned.
We got on the train, but it was so confusing figuring things out because it was all in symbols and there really wasn’t much English. Luckily ben speaks mandarin? Or at least he tries, and he guided us to a castle looking hotel by the side of the beach in huealien. We booked a family suite and then went and rented tandem bikes. I have never tandem bike rode before. Missy was my partner and whenever it got hard, she would jump off. Andrew and ashton were partners, and she pretended to be a genie and refused to pedal. Needless to say, adam and ben were waaay ahead of us, so we ended up meeting them at a sea food restaurant. We all got random dishes and put them in the middle and then went to town. We tandem bike rode for a while afterwards and then met up with the group of SAS kids we were supposed to meet and hung out on the beach. After a while, we decided to go inside and we played sardines. Sardines is that game I used to play when I was little. Its when its pure dark in a room and one person hides and then everyone searches for them and when you find them, you hide with them and pack like a sardine. We played for about two hours. Haha! we then went t get dinner but everything was closed because it was too late, so the man at the front desk called his brother to deliver us pizza hut. We called it brother pizza.  We ordered the most unusual pizza! They have shrimp paste and shrimp pizza?!  We went out onto the boardwalk and hung out with the other group of SASers for a few hours, and then around 2 we went back in to bed.