Surfin Sunday

Concerning travelling this weekend was a lacy weekend for me. I started on Saturday into the weekend by trying to sleep as long as I wake up, the first time since I am in Taiwan without any alarm. That brought me leave the apartment round noon with Fulong as destination. Fulong is the east coast place you can easily reach by train from the train station in Nangang within 90minutes and offers a nice sandy beach. That was exactly the reason why I wanted to go there, just to lay down on the beach, enjoy the sun and try to make highly visible that I am not Taiwanese, by getting a tan.

The nice and relaxing afternoon was followed by a shopping and night market tour with Johanna. This tour ended up at the wholesale night market of Taipei, Wufengpu. For the time we had spend out at the streets, which offered a lot of funny, most pink things to buy, we did not buy a lot. But you cannot say no to all of the bags the offer here, which means, finally we bought something.

The best part of the weekend was the Sunday. I had to get up at 6.30 to meet at an MRT-Station (great points of orientation this stations) with Shuwei,

my surfing teacher for this day. We drove to a beach at the east coast to enjoy the weaves while surfing. The security introduction was followed by tome dry practicing at the beach before we made it out to the water for starting the real funny part. For luck the waves were not as high, so it was a good day to start practicing this sport and it was great fun. Except a lunch break for may be 90minutes we had spend the whole day at the water, chatting and surfing. Great sport, but a pity you cannot do it in Germany. But even if you could do it, you could not compare it, because the sun was shining without any break and the beach we went to for surfing was surrounded by tropical green hills which created a great ambience.

Even the surf shop where I rented my board was such a nice and fitting place for surfing. The funniest thing about this surf club was the owner’s dog. You want to know what can be funny about a dog. See here

He had a kind of skin infections, which made it necessary to shave him.

The Chinese dinner with the group of surfers rounded the whole weekend off. In some way it was like one of these days at the water ski lake in Paderborn, but with salty water and a lot of Mandarin instead of the usual German slang. By the way, Shuwei seems to be the biggest fan of Germany, I have ever met. He knows a lot about Germany and tries to teach himself some German – which, of course, is better than my Mandarin. It is funny to hear somebody speaking about your country with such an enthusiasm and most of the things he likes about Germany seem to be so general to me.

All together it was a great day with lots of experiences about Taiwan and Germany, and at least with some new friends.