I think because all of us slept quite late the previous night, we woke up pretty late that morning. I tink it was the morning that CL and I overslept past our meeting time. haha~



finally woke up and dragged ourselves out for breakfast, which is the famous 永和豆漿 (Yong He Soya Milk). The service was pretty bad in this particular outlet in 嘉義, but i dismissed it as an assumption that the owner's face was bornt to be fierce-looking, and that she did not like to talk much. The Soya Milk was interestingly mixed with 米漿, making it pretty much richer, but for me, it lost the original nice soya taste which i liked a lot. The 油條 was quite huge, but it was ok, oily and salty, tasting pretty much like what we have in Singapore.

after the breakfast, we went back to hotel to pack our stuff to check out and go to 阿里山. by the time we checked out, the sky started pouring again. according to the tv (we watched a lot of news in taiwan), the hurricane pearl has just reached the straits between taiwan and china, and so it's hitting full force at taiwan now. sounds pretty scary huh? there were even images of how the waves were rushing in, sweeping away tables and chairs in 高雄, which reminded me of the footages during the tsunami.

upon reaching the train station, we learnt that all train and bus services to 阿里山 were terminated due to the danger of the hurricane. but we booked hotel up in 阿里山 liao, paid liao, how not to go! anyway, i sure did not wan to miss out on all the 阿里山的姑娘 who are supposedly 美如水. haha~ so we took a taxi up.



the lucky us managed to get a 7-seater taxi, and we all squeezed into it and got ourselves up 阿里山. the trip wasn't easy. the roads were windy and long (the journey took around 4 hours, or issit 5?) and there were falling stones from the cliffs onto the road. but we could really tell that the driver was really skillful and safe in his driving. he drove pretty fast altho it was windy, and whenever he had the chance he would overtake, but he would always sound his horn to warn incoming traffic from the opposite direction. then, he really kept to his own lane during turns, which a lot of Genting taxis do not do. the bad thing was that because he was driving so fast and there were so much windy turns and rocks, the trip was both sway-ish and bumpy.

i couldn't really sleep and had to force myself to shut my eyes while my head kept bumping onto the window, others tried to too. by the time we reached our hotel up in 阿里山 (around 2plus or 3pm), yeok had 暈車 while the rest of us were nearly half dead. plus! the weather was DAMN COLD! even tho we had our jackets on, we could still feel the chilling wind biting our skin. we learnt later that it was only around 10 degrees Celsius. woah! goodness heavens...

anyway, it was so cold, we didn't feel like going out at all, so after dis-baggage-ing, we crawled into the cold blankets, had our not-bad lunch (packed food from the foot of 阿里山) and watched tv. the signals were pretty bad due to the weather, and we could only receive a handful of weird channels. we watched a traffic channel (telling u which expressway is jammed and so on, and quite frequent updates on the hurricane news) and later a certain drama show starring 伊能靜. Halfway thru the 伊能靜 show, most of us fell asleep, including me.

i woke up at arnd 8pm i tink. by that time, the rest of them were awake liao. CL and yeok even went out to reckee the place. we got ourselves dressed (not that we were undressed, just that we need to put on more clothes! it was freaking cold...), and brace the coldness in search of... dinner!



we found a little restaurant and i was appointed to order the dinner. and we had... 石頭火鍋!! haha... i always have this fantasy about eating 火鍋 on a very cold night, and i really was living my fantasy that night. the 火鍋 comes with in a package with side dishes and stuff, so there's actually quite a lot of food. the warmness from both the 火鍋 and the company made the night pretty enjoyable... only if we were breathing smoke... eh... wait...

*hoof hoof* I WAS BREATHING SMOKE! woah! the temperature suddenly dropped outside, and because the restaurant door was left open and i was sitting closest to the door, i felt the cold and started breathing smoke!! WHOOT! wah~ i was *hoof*ing and *hoof*ing and the rest follow suite as well.

after dinner, we decided to have our second supper feast, and went to the nearby convenience store. besides the food and drinks, also bought beer and peanuts. woah~



remembered sleeping quite late even tho a bit tipsy. woah, discovered hp is quite a drinker. ;) the day was pretty relaxing and managed to take the day off to catch up on the sleep. guess we needed it for the second half of the trip.

[to be continued]...