On with the show.
I woke up earlier than the rest of the guys because I volunteered to get breakfast. We were really sick of the food they were serving us and Wee Hong had recommended this burger place just down the street that you'd see if you walk from Nanjian Rd to Xi Men Ding. It was pretty good, better than the Mcdonalds I had later in the day! I let the rest of them sleep a while longer as they had a late night. I entertained myself by reading this magazine with Edison Chen (the king of style) on the cover!
And also cam-whored a bit, but I couldn't find any angle that I looked good in. I'm aware I look like crap. It's all in the angles. Anyway, this is the view from the toilet, so if you happen to be an exhibitionist, you could probably pull the blinds up and pee in full view of the street below! After that, I took a walk around Xi Men Ding to look for Luo Zhi Xiang's shop with the address my sister gave me but I couldn't find it! We made our way to Xin Bei Tou in search of our hot spring as the weather looked good.
Just a photo to show the translation of Transformers in Chinese! This was at the train station.
Okay, so when we stepped in the hot spring, our eyes were assaulted by the sight of naked old men. I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but we felt like... fish out of water. We were aware of what the situation we were putting ourselves into. It's easy to talk yourself into something but being in that actual situation, we did feel a bit uncomfortable. It wasn't a very expensive one. It costs about SGD 5 per person. The walls were grey, with a huge wooden rack for putting shoes and bags. The men laid on the benches, almost as if suntanning their balls in full glory. I thought of many other gross descriptions but I think you get the idea. And initially we hesitated about taking it off, despite having seen each other in the army shower stalls before anyway. I'm don't think of myself as a conservative person or anything of that sort but I suppose we just weren't used to it.
We did feel like outsiders though, because we didn't know what we were supposed to do exactly, so most of what we did was from observation.
The water itself was freaking hot. There were two pools, one that was further away from the pipe and we guessed was cooler than the other. They weren't exactly seperated, but I was directed away from the hotter pool by this old man. Anyway, the water is so freaking hot that if there were girls hotter than that (as mentioned in opening entry of the Taiwan trip), you wouldn't even be able to stand! The second, hotter pool was worse. I had to control myself from running out the moment I submerged myself from running out.
Despite the discomfort of being in the nude (and here's the really ironic part), it did feel really liberating. I don't know how to explain it but we all agreed that it was an eye-opener, and that it was definitely worth our time. If we were to turn back time we'd do it again, but if we were to do it again after this experience... haha, I guess I'll have to think about it!
I totally agreed with Terence's caption of his friendster pic, "Beitou all nude hotspring!! Conquered that.."!
After that while walking back to the MRT station, we came across a library which we went in to explore.
I thought that it was really cool, because it looked like a treehouse. The outside was surrounded by greenery and all and it's interior was mostly made of wood. Going into something as common but as essential to a community as a library really gives you a more intimate view of the people's culture.
We took photos with the stones because they had all these funny symbols.
I can come up with a 101 reasons for cam-whoring.
After that we dropped by this place for food. I can't remember if that's Yakult or Vitagen but they gave it to us for free. Although the stall was small and simple, it served surprisingly good food. In fact we hadn't tasted something this good in quite awhile. Apparently soaking in the hot spring does work up quite an appetite too!
We then made our way to Jiantan to visit Shihlin again! There were huge sports shops that we explored once more as we already had a couple of shoes in mind. It was a matter of getting a good price for them, so we had a crazy time hunting around for discounts and all! The bubble tea shop in the bottom left picture was playing Jolin's Wu Niang album, so we decided to buy a couple of drinks from them! Haha... also, Daniel couldn't quite stay away from the doll-catching machine yet again! He didn't leave empty-handed though! We didn't buy the shoes as we found it rather impossible to make up our mind. The sun was beginning to set and we made our way to Danshui.
Where the view was incredibly breath-taking.
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