Taiwanese Women Pulling Cart

Day After - Go Skateboarding Day 6/22

The day before Taiwan celebrates Go Skateboarding Day, I headed up to Taipei for an early skate. We started out just warming up under the bridge as Mike wall rode all morning, waiting for everyone to meet up to go skate.

The plan was to skate this airplane. It began to rain, so we walked around for hours. By the time we found where the airplane was, there was only an empty space where it once existed.

We managed to find a nice indoor place to skate for a while since the weather was awful. In an old badly needing repaired theater.

Photo by 春艷春艷 (Eric)

Nike Skateboarding in Taiwan

Nike Skate team's Justin Brock, Youness Amrani and Wieger Van Wageningen came to Taiwan along with a couple of their European riders Marek Zaprazny and daniel Lebron. Sadly I didn't get to run into them myself but one of my friends did. I regularly skate at a couple of the spots you will see in the video. Here is a link to the video the posted up. http://youtu.be/IExlXdMkgKg?t=15s

Riding the Walls

Michael - Wall riding

Michael is about a 3 hour bus or train ride away from my home. Whenever I go to his house he takes me to new and interesting spots. But for some reason this weekend (and most of the time) Michael is really into doing wall rides. So we hit so many different wall ride spot which I find them to be really fun anyway.

Me - Wall Riding around the corner

Me - Carving the full-pipe

Me - doing the full loop...with some help

Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival - 平溪

I am not sure of the exact story, but they started launching sky lanterns in Pingxi, because it was a secluded area. It began to have lots of crime after Han had settled there. So they would launch sky lanterns to either let people know there was a bandit attack, or it was to let people know that they were safe. This event eventually became a large scale festival when the coal mines closed in the late twentieth century and the villagers need a new income.

I headed up to Pingxi (平溪) saturday around 1pm with Jacob. When we first arrived in Taipei, we got off the bus, took the escalator down two stories, when I suddenly realized I didn't have my wallet. I quickly remembered where I left it on the bus. I ran back up to the 3rd floor to retrieve it from the bus which had already left. I talked to the guy at the front desk telling him my problem. With no response he waved his arm and started to go down the escalators, he then brought me to the ticket booth. I realized then, he didn't understand any English, and I also realized that none of their employers understood English. Which was fine, because I could practice struggling through my Chinese vocabulary to explain the problem. After a clueless dialogue, back and forth they had found the wallet and I could retrieve it when it returned back to the city in a few hours.

After I received my wallet, Jake and I headed out a little later then we planned. We hopped on the MRT (Taiwan Subway) and after a transfer made it to the bus which then took us to Pingxi. When we arrived there was thousands of people. We walked down a road shoulder to shoulder, 10 people wide for a long distance.

Jake and I bought one of our own after watching thousands of other people send their own up. ($3US). 

The whole night kinda felt like this...



...but without the girl