Isle of my Isle Part 1: War

Sorry for the long delay in blog posts. Between the travel and being exhausted every night I haven't had a good opportunity to get a few good posts in. Here it is at last for your enjoyment.

We undertook a small adventure to an island owned by Taiwan called Kinmen.

As you can see it is right off the coast of China. You can see the shores of China from the island itself quite easily, especially from little Kinmen. Those of you who are more familiar with Chinese-Taiwanese relations will probably wonder how this ever worked in the past. The answer is it didn't, it was the boxing ring for the 2 nations and witnessed two major battles. The U.S. was even involved in these battles it in a side role as we had an entire fleet stationed between the countries. I won't get too heavily bogged down in history though and will continue on about our trip there but if anyone is interested about the battles I'll throw in a wikipedia link. They are of interest for history buffs or military buffs since the U.S. came close to using nuclear weapons and the first AA missles were used.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis


The huge military background is evident across Kinmen and little Kinmen and that is a major part of the tourist attraction there. The following pictures show one of the remnants, Tunnels dug straight from the ocean into the solid granite mountains to hide ships from spies and artillery shells.

 

The next couple of pictures show a General's outpost and then a tunnel from a bunker. The tunnels stretch for what I would guess would be a few miles total. It's a complete maze down there in some areas. It was also weird seeing all these military structures as 2 of my uncles served in the military on this island digging and building the same type of structures you see here. 

First Full Day

Jet Lag was in full effect for me today so I was up at 7am with ease this Tuesday. That would be Monday 5pm central U.S. time. I'm not a morning person at all by the way, so this is a very bizarre thing going on here. I'll probably do a whole post on jet lag itself but will keep that separate from trip updates to not drag on too much and reserve it for those who are curious.

We ran by my grandparents' place to visit with them. They actually live with my youngest uncle so we get to visit with his family too. For anyone who is not familiar with most East Asian culture there is a great deal of emphasis placed on Confucian-based ways of life. So a great deal of respect and care is given to the older members of your family. As such you don't see many grandparents placed in nursing homes or things like that. Instead you will see them with their own home, with children giving as much care as they can or if that's too difficult the children will have them live with them. With my family the children who live in Taiwan each have a special room for the grandparents to live in or use when they visit.

After a couple of hours my dad, brother, and Shawna all decided to walk around the area and show her around. We headed toward one of the large and well known department stores in the area. Department stores are quite popular in Taiwan are for them what malls are to Americans. They are typically quite large 10+ floor buildings with just about everything you'd every need inside of them.

 A crew making an amazing genre of food. Dim Sum. If you don't know what it is educate yourself here (uncultured SWINE!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dim_sum

Home Base

I thought I'd give a brief post on where I'll be based at for the next 3 weeks. I've taken up residence in my oldest cousin's bachelor pad with my dad, brother, and Shawna (brother's girlfriend for any who missed that).  So It's a small American hold out in the middle of Kaohsiung.

Want a great indicator that someone is a bachelor? Welll, they'll have one of these babies:

Here's a view of the outside world from my room

Side Note: I think someone missed passing a design by their boss or something, I don't know... I'll let you decide. I present to you my door stop.

hmm.....

To all curious eyes

First thing, thanks to all those who have actually bothered to look at this blog, I honestly thought I'd be pulling in 3 of the same people per day who just pitied my worthless attempt at being social on the internet. This was a way for me to kill time at first but since it seems you guys are interested so I'll try to step up the game since the pressure is on.

To reward all of you I'm going to let you in on a nice little treasure of Taiwan: the garbage trucks (Yes, seriously).

Yes, I stole the video from Youtube. I'm not going outside and waiting for one of these things to roll by just to record it as everyone stares while I dishonor my family's name. But anyway, these garbage trucks are pretty much standard across the nation. The only difference between that and where I am at is that I am in the heart of a major city so the building owners tend to have a large bin or dumpster that gets collected or emptied into these things. The reason they play the music is to let the people know they are on the way so they can be ready to unload their trash (they place the music at levels a little bit below those of police car or ambulance sirens). The trucks come by 2-3 times a day just in case you're busy and miss a collection.  OH, they also come in Fur Elise models for those of you that are extra classy.

Also

Oh, and if you ever wonder about that whole stuck in a tin can hurtling through the air dilemma people talk about. Just remember how nice the exterior conditions are.

  Yup  -81 degrees

Made It

Well, sorry for the delay but Narita's(Tokyo's Airport) Wi-Fi was heavily congested and didn't get a good chance to upload the journey pics when I finally got to where I'll be staying for the next 3 weeks. That and I was exhausted. But I'll rewind a short bit and take you back to what happened after my last post. We finally left Chicago at 12:30 on our 14 hour plane ride. Unfortunately we didn't get bumped up to business class like last time.

People ask me what a 14 hour plane ride is like and how you cope with that. Honestly there is no easy answer. The best thing to do is just to sleep it away. I've tried just about everything when it comes to killing that time and I portion it out typically with half the time spent sleeping and the other half reading, listening to music, watching movies, or playing video games.

The view from my seat looking toward the back of the plane. My brother and Shawna are located about 10 rows back on the right.

There we have our brand new traveler at 6 hours into the flight.

First flight

Hells yeah, wes ona plane.