Moon festival

If you read my other blog, you probably figured out that the typhoon was a lot of nothing here in Hsinchu. Many other cities such as Taipei some 80 km north of us had floods and strong winds. Anyway, we were pretty much stuck in the city for the weekend and only visited the beach as you saw in the pictures. The second week of school has started but just took a short break for the moon festival.

Yesterday evening we had a small barbeque party in the flat, we used a small barbeque on the balcony so the apartment smells like smoke and meat but that’s fine, i like both. Today me and Yini took the scooter up to the mountains on only half a tank of petrol (about the size of a big jug) and ended up in a hot spring overlooking jungle clad mountains and a river. Both the drive up on winding mountain roads in the beautiful landscape and the hot spring were really nice. On the way down it looked like we would run out of petrol at any time as the needle was pointing to the bottom however, we got to zhudong, a suburb to Hsinchu on what was left and the engine didn’t even cut out, we simply drove to the nearest petrol station. In Zhudong* we stopped by a market for some food and a look at the full moon, that was also nice. We went home and called it a day, a nice one at that.

 

 

 

 

*In chinese Zhudong is written 竹東 and the town I live in, Hsinchu is written 新竹. As you can see the last character in Hsinchu corresponds with the first one in in Zhudong (Zhu/Chu/Jhu, depending on spelling, means bamboo) The second one in Zhudong means east, so Zhudong is quit simply east Hsinchu.