Lessons learned

I learned a very important lesson the other day: when searching for a location of a business in Taipei, an address is absolutely necessary, especially when the business is of the non-mainstream type. Researching jits and kettlebell places online, the places claim they're a lot easier to find than they actually are. Apparently if a business wants to have any type of signage outside (including a painting on the window), they have to pay a pretty hefty tax, and for the non-mainstream stuff (read: a lot of the stuff i like), it's "not worth it." Long story short, I ended up walking around 20 miles on Friday, was late for the KB class (so I didn't get to partake), didn't find the other jits place, and didn't really accomplish much other than walking down a couple unfamiliar streets.

On the plus side, I found the MMA place by asking a mall info lady (may have made a contact through them), found a hidden gem of an alley market (sounds worse than it actually is...alley markets have a lot of small farmers with their fresh produce/livestock---a lot of the livestock are killed on spot, or for the seafoods, sold alive).

I stopped by homebase for a couple hours to grab a quick shower and put my feet up real quick before I headed out for a 4 hour jits session (ended up being only 2 because my back was acting up from the day before).

Saturday, I went to the Lantern Festival.  It was completely not what I expected. I thought there were going to be tons of people with these giant paper lanterns that you write on and set free into the sky, like in the movies and what I saw on tv. Apparently that was at a different location, and they only did that once. The festival I went to was a plaza that was lined with big, shaped, hand-made lanterns of various shapes, sizes, and colors, made by kids from the schools, grades K-12 and a couple colleges/universities as well. Most of them were dragon-themed, being the year of the dragon. These lanterns were all entered in a contest, so if you picture something like the Grand Rapids Art Prize, or an outdoor art gallery that displayed only lanterns, that's kind of what it was like.

The closing ceremony was actually pretty weak. I was hoping there would be some cool show with acrobats and lights and people and just...something crazy. What I was presented with was a less than subpar (yea, I know) fountain show with a few fire balls, lasers and fireworks. The fountain at the MGM Grand is more entertaining.

Monday I checked out one of the local World Gyms. The World Gyms here are like the LA Fit/24 Hr Fit/Lifetime Fit in the US. So...a little pricey....$75USD/month. Plus registration fee. And no KB's. So I had to decline. The KB class is about $7USD per class, offered 3x/wk, so that seems more of a fit for me. We'll see after tomorrow's free KB class. I may have to resort to at-home workouts doing bodyweight stuff.

I joined a couple facebook groups for hiking and the like, so hopefully I'll get to see some nature pretty soon. I checked out some of the nightlife, and it seems as if there are many options for clubs. I might work up the courage to go to a couple of them, just to see what it's like. Just thinking about it, though, is already wearing me out! hahaa :)

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! In my case, it was "buy yourself a buncha delicious treats after rolling with a buncha sweaty dudes from all over the world" day.... :)