25 March 2017
Ritual sacrifice
Eating delicious dumplings in Puli
As promised, this will be a short update because I walked enough today.
As promised, there will be a photo of my watch screen, but also my phone screen.
Other than that, I found a dumpling place, I think it may be the same chain as I ate at in Taitung, it won by default due to location, more on that below.
After dinner, I wandered back to the supermarket and admired their collection of pink things for white day which was a week and a half ago already.
White day is reverse valentines day a month after valentines day and was invented by a chocolate company in Japan in 1978. Originally you gave white things, but pink is so hot right now, more specifically millennial pink which is trending hard, so pink has replaced white on white day, and white day is now an entire month in the supermarkets and convenience stores.
Here is how valentines day now works in Asian countries thanks to the forward thinking chocolate company in Japan.
On Feb 14, girls select boys who they would like to receive a gift from on white day. Thats it. Valentines day over.
Boys who are selected then have an entire month to save money, find a loan shark, win at gambling, sell a kidney or rob someone to get enough money to give the expected bounty of gifts on March 14.
Boys who were not selected the month prior become the envy of all those who were selected. Some offer high interest loans to selected boys to profit from their misfortune.
First photo of the evening is my dinner, cause I was starving.
The soup is very plain but has hand made noodles. The dumplings are pork and leek and are delicious, boiled of course, for the healthy. And to bolster the good for healthy, kim chi, if you dont eat kim chi every day and you have Korean DNA, you will die.
The most common stores in Taiwan are no doubt tea shops of every kind, second would have to be hairdressers, then scooter repair shops, and close behind is scooter helmet shops.
You can collect the entire hello kitty helmet collection to match each outfit.
With the reliance on scooter repair and helmet stores, Taiwan can never abolish scooters.
I returned to my hotel to find the singers had put on black robes and are now staging some kind of ritual sacrifice around a mobile fire trailer, directly under my balcony window.
After considering all possible reasons why, only one reason remains so it must therefore be true.
Earlier when they honored me with song, as the mythical creature of the long walk up a lonely mountain path, I largely ignored them, despite being the only person nearby.
They were deeply offended by this, and are now pulling some kind of voodoo ritual trying to kill me with carbon monoxide fumes going into my air conditioner.
Here it is, the final count, 60,315 steps. 48.9km apparently, I should have done that extra 1.1km.
And heres the graph that shows I did not stop all day. Let me explain the dips in the graph.
The first one was getting ready to leave and putting my shoes on.
Soon after there are a couple of very minor dips, thats when I went into 2 convenience stores to buy supplies. Then we get a couple of blips where I took photos, and then a bigger one just before 2pm (count the dots to the right of 12). Thats where I was on the summit and I stopped to take my angry selfie.
Then I raced all the way back down, and theres another big dip just before 5pm, thats when I bought a drink at a petrol station once I was back in civilization, I was there no more than 5 minutes cause I stood around and drank the whole thing so I could put the empty bottle in the bin.
Then theres the big dip down to nothing at around 6:30pm, which is when I returned to the hotel and did the earlier update to this website, followed by immediately going out again and walking to dinner, sitting and eating it (the last blip/dip) and walking back to my hotel.
Thats a pretty detailed explanation of how to get over 60k steps in a day, just dont stop walking.