Friedman's travels

My friend from Cleveland Via Taiwan, in Taiwan.   It was awesome catching up with an old close friend in her original country.  Love hearing her perspective after being in her country to three weeks.    We leave Taiwan tomorrow and head towards Japan I'll close out: - Yes, they have a ton of food and eating healthy is not easy. - Loved the climbing gyms, wish we had made more of them and I hadn't lost my climbing shoes. - Very friendly and helpful people.   - Pretty easy country to travel - One of the hardest parts for me is reading the news back home, just makes me sick.   Alien landscape and alien life forms. Captain something grand, and shabbat at the gold mine. this is self explanatory. This was a big festival that went on for a month in various places.  Again, lots of fireworks.  The other is a Ferrari at a market, it just seemed out of place.   This is the traditional garbage can eating etiquette.   Hikes :...

  Since Taiwan is a volcanic island there are lots of natural hot springs heated by volcanoes. We stayed in a hotel located in a hot spring town with lots of free hot foot baths. In our hotel there was a pool plus a hot tub spa. It was completely free to go up and get in. It was a lot of fun to go up and swim. This was in a free hot springs park but the water was not hot, the water was luke warm and had little fish swimming around in it. The idea is that you put your feet in the water and the fish eat all of your dead skin. It is supposed to exfoliate your skin, make it softer and get rid of all your dead skin. It felt really weird and as soon as you put your feet in they would swarm you. This is dad and his feet, mom and her feet, and me, but my feet are not in this. This was outside an ice cream store. It was definetly not my taste. They had spicy ice cream. 

After two weeks based in Taipei, we rented a car and headed out around the northeastern part of Taiwan.  Spending about 2 - 3 nights per location, we stayed in Jiufen, Jiaoxi, and Luodong.  The kids' posts include some of the things we saw.   Jiufen is a cute mountain town with a famous old street with loads of shops and restaurants and beautiful tea houses overlooking the mountains and the ocean.  From this base, we visited the Yehliu Geopark, and the Jinguashi Gold Ecological Museum and hiked up teapot mountain.  Peyton and I also hiked up Mount Keelung to find a geocache.  Peyton has a post on teapot mountain and the gold museum. After leaving Jiufen, we drove down the coast, stopping off at Fulong Beach for some swimming before arriving in the hot springs town of Jiaoxi.  See Talia's post for more details on this stop.  The hotel here, with the grotto-like hot spring pool on the roof, was the high point of the trip for the kids.  We ...

We've seen a great collection of warning signs with highly descriptive pictures that transcend language.  Here are my favorites.  Not sure what this says about our choice of trails.     The last one isn't a warning about possessed cats, but an indication to watch out for the multitude of stray cats roaming around town.