Day Trip to Wulai

This morning, Lily (my friend and current hostess) and I met up with another friend, Chia-Ling and headed up to Wulai. Wulai is up in the mountains and has several natural hotsprings.

As you go up, you pass dozens and dozens of hot spring resorts, all looking very inviting...

Wulai is definitely a tourist attraction and there are hundreds of shops lining the streets. But more than anything else are the food stands, especially Mochi oddly enough. Wulai apparently shares my belief that all food tastes better if it is grilled and served on a stick.

I tried:

Mifan: Thin rice noodles with vegetables
Grilled mochi with a sticky sweet/salty sauce
Grilled corn that appeared to be rubbed down with BBQ sauce (very good)
and the weirdest was a crepe with shaved peanut, oddly flavored icecream (I think it was sort of marzipan-ish, but I really couldn't identify it) and cilantro. Yes, cilantro.

Photos forthcoming.

Lily, Chia-ling and I went down to the river, which looked like a normal river except that people had made these odd little circles out of stone and were hanging out inside of the circles. When we came down, we realized that the pools closest to the shore were HOT. PAINFULLY hot. People had then segmented off parts of the COOOOLD river so that the hot water would pour in and mix to create a comfortable warm place to hang out. The contrast was shocking.

We found a nice pool, while another guy also using the pool kept rearranging the rocks to get it a bit hotter, which was really great. The water seemed to change temperature a lot, sometimes coming in luke warm then suddenly turning very hot. It was nice but we had to be careful. Also, the sand was sometimes REALLY hot. However, it was nice, kind of like the heated seats in a mini cooper.

After a few hours and me getting too much sun despite the sun block, we headed back to Taipei. Chia-Ling went home, but Lily and I went up to Shilin market to meet my friend Dora and get dinner. Dora took us to an unbelievable vegetarian restaurant. I wouldn't have believed it was vegetarian had it not been advertised that way. It was amazing.

The market was a madhouse. We didn't consider that it's a weekend of some public holidays so EVERYONE is on vacation and came to the market. It was impossible to move around even, so we decided against wandering the market. We might do that after a few weeks. Then Lily and I grabbed some coffee and headed back to Xinzhuang. We are both completely exhausted. I'm going to sleep. Tomorrow we are going to "A place with lots of cats."

Um...ok....