08:21 am greencastle, june 28; 09:21 pm taipei, june 28

okay, so i'm kinda tired now, what with having woken up at like six this morning then having been walking around much of the day, wet, so i'm probably not yet going to post what i'm writing now, type up what i wrote yesterday, or even go upstairs to the fourteenth floor, where internet and video games happen. instead, i'll probably just write for a bit, read my book, then try to sleep--i'd forgotten in the 36 or however many hours how loud two three-year-olds can be. ugh.

...but i'll start this one with this morning, because hopefully i'll have yesterday's up before i do this one. lesse...our hotel (about which i believe i've written, or, if not, i'll surely talk about on some other occasion) declined to provide anything that i enjoy for breakfast, much less anything much at all. perhaps...four selections of things that one could add to one's rice gruel, two of which were actually the same thing just prepared slightly differently. no meat, no decent veggies. i was very, very disappointed. did catch sight of an almost-dead cockroach and numerous other bugs, though. (which reminds me, a rat, yesterday, too, at the restaurant which served us our dinner and me my ai yu.) but we got out of the place around eightish with a new taxi driver/tour guide. he brought us to many, many an interesting place, including, among, of course, others, a primarily military, but also partly public, airport (we only looked from the car), an abby (which had a bunch of nuns doing such things as sewing their clothes, preparing the rice, making candles [that was pretty cool], making pottery, drying wood, etc.), and, most importantly, mountains.

these mountains were definitely the highlight of the entire hua lien trip. we walked around (unfortunately, on distinctly man-made--paved--paths) for a very, very long time, filming and taking pictures until the camera ran out of batteries. oh, wait, before this, we ate at some restaurant on one of the mountains. it had hua lien's specialty fish, whose name i can't remember; it was very good and had a slightly different texture from most fish i've eaten--it was more like, say, meat. chicken or something. there was also wild boar with green onions or something, and that dish was, also, of course, tasty. a few others, but not as noteworthy. saw a bunch of marble carvings and statues, for hua lien is also famous for (you know, besides the water show thing and the fish, that is) their granite and marble...mining, or whatever. can't...recall...meh. lots of limestone and stuff. extremely good carvings, of course.

...but back to the mountains. amazing. surround basically everything around hua lien. beautiful. serene. i loved it, especially the valleys, in which there ran a constant stream of swiftly running water, largely due to the highly enjoyable (for me, anyways) amounts of rain in the past few days, especially today. it was only raining when we got up and left, but it was definitely pouring later. with the entire mountain area getting so much rain in the past few days, there were huge waterfalls and temporary streams all over the place and the main river was significantly--meters--higher than normal. (which reminds me of another thing i missed; this morning, we pedal'd a boat out on a lake while it was raining, and i thought it really nice, but it'd've been immeasurably better with company that could also relax and enjoy the rain with me.) pictures all over. not a whole lot to say, just a lot at which to look. i'll do something about that...sometime. maybe tomorrow or something, if i head over to my mom's hotel, where she and her camera are. ah, well. i'm tired, and one of the girls has been in my room giving me a headache for a long time now, literally just standing there and screaming for about 1/3 of the time--no exagerration. so i'll turn in soon. later...