We extended last weekend by a day and took the High Speed Rail to Tainan, about 222 km or 1:09 train hours south from here. Tainan has much to offer: Good weather (it gets pretty cold these days in Hsinchu; around 23 °C at night!), lots of culture, and, most of all, good food and big night markets!

Our means of transportation was a scooter, without a doubt the most convenient way of getting around. We even brought our own helmets cause riding at 50 km/h with a 100 TWD helmet (about the price of two bowls of noodles), the kind that scooter rental places offer, is just half the fun.

The thing that personally impressed me the most was a Buddhist ceremony we saw at the beach. (It goes by the name of 海之祭 or, in full, 安平海祭淨安祈福消災冥陽法會. The translation is left to the reader - and the writer - as an exercise.) The preparations were huge since the whole beach was decorated not only with traditional items such as paper ships, statues, flags, swags, and fruit, but also with modern elements like fireworks, a laser show, and an ear-shattering loudspeaker system. The ceremony itself consisted of dance, praying, music, and an abundance of fire. All of this was to honor the gods, pray for luck, and hope the people who died in the ocean can find the way to heaven. Truly an impressive spectacle.

Apart from that there were different parks, temples, flowers, and nature. (I just noticed I forgot to take pictures of food again. Maybe I'll remember next time ...)

Check out my Tainan album for all the pictures!

This and some other interesting night shots were taken during one of our walks to 象山 (Xiang shan; Elephant mountain). Check out the Xiang shan by night album for some nice photos of Taipei and 101.

It's a long time ago and the memory of my last vacation has already faded, let alone the feeling of relaxation, but some three weeks after returning from Okinawa the photos are finally ready.

Okinawa is a relatively small island in the south of Japan and inhabited by a little more than 1.3 million people. Actually, the whole prefecture includes hundreds of little islands, the Ryukyu Islands, but we only visited the main one. We spent two days in Naha, the prefecture's capital, and southern area before heading up to the center and eastern part.

Some of the views are breathtaking and so is driving on the left side for the first time in your life. Apart from the occasional struggle with the GPS (strictly Japanese and only workable with the handbrake pulled - learn the hard way!) it went fine, though, and we enjoyed five relaxing days in the sun.

The pictures, complete with GPS coordinates, thanks to my trusted and always present "Easy Showily" GPS logger:

Okinawa (Days 1 and 2)
Okinawa (Days 3 to 5)

All good things come to an end. This is especially and unfortunately true for vacations.

If you think that vacations are relaxing then you should try coming back from one of my vacations. Hundreds of photos and dozens of GPS traces are waiting to be combined and put online.

Luckily, I finally found a working program that does this job quite well: Geotag. It loads pictures from different directories and multiple GPS tracks and with a little bit of magic you'll have coordinates in your pictures in no time. The result of this can be seen here:

Turtle Island album

Turtle Island (龜山島, Gui shan dao) is a small, uninhabited island on the west coast of Taiwan. Unfortunately it's still under military control and visiting involves going with a rather large tour group or a lot of paperwork (If you have the choice, go with the paperwork! :-), but it's worthwile in spite of that. See for yourself.

Oh, and pictures from Okinawa are coming up soon. At least some of them; turns out my camera is allergic to water. ;-)

Many Taiwanese universities have small lakes on their campus, which is really nice cause you can go for a relaxing walk during your classes or in your spare time.

And then there's the National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu where a walk around the lake is more like an obstacle course around dead animals:

Theories as to the reason of this animal battle ground include "bored to death by professors" and "university graduate designed aeration system". ;-)

All jokes aside, apart from the lake the university is quite nice. Take a look by visiting my Taiwanese Universities album.

It's fun, after living abroad for a while, to go back to your home country to see what has changed and what hasn't. Some things never seem to change:

• Mother's cooking is still the best
• Shops close over lunch time
• The amount of snow
• The challenge of getting food after 22h!

And some things are not quite what they used to be:

• I can walk through my parents' home town largely incognito
• I feel weird going to a Chinese restaurant (especially accompanied by a Taiwanese)
• My ability to speak my mother tongue (it's embarrassing trying to order something in a bakery and not remembering its name ;-)

Together with Ivy I traveled through Switzerland in what can be described as a mixture between Swiss retiree style (i.e. sitting in the train a lo-o-ot) and Japanese city hopping. In three days we went from Chur to Lausanne in the Glacier Express, from there to Basel and Bern, and via Zürich back to Chur. Our vacation also included a Snow Show in Arosa and a one-day trip to St. Moritz, one of the most expensive (and, if it wasn't for the scenery, most boring) towns in Switzerland.

But Chinese food (not my idea, I swear) was not the only thing that reminded us of Taiwan. See for yourself:

Apparently, the Love sculpture in front of Taipei's 101 is not the only one of its kind. Turns out that there are more instances of Robert Indiana's art piece than you'd think as a quick Internet search reveals. :-)

My gallery has more pictures from our trip. Enjoy!

Maybe one resolution for the (Chinese) New Year should be to blog a little more often.

If you're wondering what I'm up to these days: shopping, cleaning, and working. The former two are mostly related to my new apartment. I have the essentials to live, i.e. a desk, a couch, a decent washing machine, and a heater, but many things are still outstanding. There's carpets, curtains, a TV, a Wii, a decent computer (to replace the horrible horrible Lenovo laptop I'm forced to use), and lots of little household things.

Then there's work which is keeping me quite busy, especially shortly before the Chinese New Year's vacation where as many things as possible need to be wrapped up. Who wants to work in their vacation, after all? Well, I'll be working at least for a few hours. During my trip through Swizerland I will quickly stop by my old university with which Logitech works together. No nostalgic feelings, though.

When I'm not working or shopping, I'm trying to bike a little more often, at least when the weather allows. One such weekend was about three weeks back and there are even a few pictures in my gallery.

I finally have my GPS logger, a Wintec WPL-1000, so keeping track of my bike trips has gotten a lot easier. Check out the route of my last trip.

I'll try to post some snow pictures from Switzerland. ;-)

Last weekend was Logitech Family Day, a trip/event organized by Logitech where employees can bring their friends and families.

The activities were not too exciting (especially the paint ball for which some people had signed up and then got to play for around 10 minutes), but I got to make one of my favorite Taiwanese desserts, 愛玉. Here are two pictures of me and another one where they were making mochi (麻糬):

By the way, Loïc was a little faster than I was, he's mentioning the event in his blog as well, including some funny pictures.

As part of the event we even got a gift voucher and today was the day where we could pick it up at the warehouse (that already made me suspicious). It turned out we had the choice between a really old webcam, a really old wired mouse, and a really old wired PS/2 keyboard. It wasn't so much a gift as a "please help us empty our warehouse, it's cheaper than ordering the trash company" object.

Anyway, free stuff is free stuff (haha, I'm cheap ;-), so I went for the keyboard. If nothing else I can use it to practice Bopomofo (the Taiwanese alphabet).

For the time being, though, I put it up in my office:

(I hate to explain jokes, but in case you can't read the Chinese, it says: "Antique keyboard exhibition. Please don't touch.")

Better late than never is my new motto when it comes to uploading pictures. I've just finished three albums with photos of my trips of the last few months:

• Chiayi and Ali shan
• Yílán and Taipei
• Kenting

Some others are still on my todo list. Unfortunately, the location data for these albums is a little sparse. For one thing, I don't always remember where the places were and for another, the satellite imagery of Taiwan is sometimes of such low resolution that it's hard to locate places without GPS.

As a first step to solving this problem I recently bought a new cell phone. But it's not just a cell phone, it's a ASUS P535, which combines cell phone, digital camera, PDA, and GPS in one slick device. In case you were wondering: Yes, it's yet another reason why my blogging frequency is fairly low.

But obviously a PDA with GPS is not the most elegant way to keep track of your location when you're doing a trip. Much better is a GPS track logger like the Wintec WPL-1000. Unfortunately it's not yet for sale but it should be in the next few weeks. So, prepare for some nice location and tracking information in the near future, here on this channel. :-)

While typhoon Krosa was heavily battering the Northern part of Taiwan last weekend a group of eight people decided to flee Hsinchu in order to visit one of the most famous tourist attractions, the Kenting National Park (墾丁國家公園, Kěndīng guójiā gōngyuán) in the south of the island. It turned out to be a good choice because medium strong winds were the only effect of the typhoon we felt, and those made for a memorable experience. (If you're wondering what happened in Hsinchu, stay tuned for pictures.)

Instead of boring you with a description of the entire weekend (I'll leave that job to the photos) I want to share two little episodes that are characteristic for what I like so much about Taiwan.

Winds were rather strong on Saturday, so not many people dared (or bothered) to go outside. Given our short stay we didn't want to stay inside and live off of instant noodles, so we decided to drive around the area and enjoy the beautiful scenery. One of our destinations was the Erluanbi Lighthouse National Park (鵝鑾鼻國家公園, Éluánbí guójiā gōngyuán) at the southernmost point of Taiwan. Unfortunately the park was closed during the typhoon and we were already heading back to our car when the staff told us that we could visit anyway, just at our own risk. No need to tell us twice! We ran in and fought our way against the wind to the top of the hill on which the lighthouse is standing. We had a blast (literally and metaphorically speaking)! It's great when rules can be bent once in a while and the fear of a legal suit doesn't stifle every hint of flexibility and common sense.

Later the same day we had lunch in 恆春 (Héngchūn), a town in Southern Taiwan. With eight people it tends to become a little difficult to choose a restaurant, so our group ended up split into four people preferring rice from one store and four people preferring food from the noodle store next door. Not a problem in Taiwan. The noodle store owner saw that we were one big group and told us to go sit together, she would bring us our food over. If that's not great service, then what is? Try the same thing in Switzerland and you'll find yourself kicked out before you realize what's going on.

I'm still sorting through everybody's pictures and making a selection. Today was National Day and I was busy trying to ride a scooter. Anyway, Candy was a lot faster, so until I'm done, go ahead and check out her gallery.

Update: (date censored) My album is online at last. Check it out!