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March 5, 2010 Central Taiwan

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Earthquakes are very common in Taiwan as the island sits at the intersection of three tectonic plates. These plates are always moving and grinding together causing shaking and shifting and the occasional uplift. On one trip to the east coast of Taiwan there was a 6.2 early in the morning. The land jumped up and down so hard that the bed felt like it was bucking rodeo horse. This week there was another quake in the southern part of the country. Not much on the news, no reported deaths, that was good. But the fortune was with the people near the quake or should I say bad fortune. There was a typhoon in the region not too long ago and destroyed the local village in a mudslide. That is where the quake was the strongest. The village was abandoned since the typhoon. I remember the 1999 earthquake that hit central Taiwan as I mentioned in my last posting. the reason I bring this up is because I wanted to share a picture of a beautiful temple located at Sun Moon Lake near the epicenter of the ...
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Rockhound Time

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I don't remember how old I was but it was not past my 12th birthday when our family traveled back to Long Island to see my mother's cousin. This is the same cousin's house where I did my first vacation (see picture below). Here is me on that first trip. Ah! Childhood memories of those days of freedom! Well on that later trip I visited with my cousin's (yes all family members are cousins or aunts and uncles if they are anyway related) neighbor's house. This man worked in New York City and collected minerals. I say minerals but we call ourselves "Rockhounds" which is the more common term, but few of us have collections of rocks. He had applied his minerals to his house. he had lamp shades covered with crushed minerals that glow in the dark. he had fence lines with crystals of all sorts growing in all directions. But the one display that I will always remember is a dull waxy piece of clear stone about one inch in diameter squarely placed in the center on a da...
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February 21, 2010 Ali Shan, Taiwan

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Well here is the first look at my travels. I spent a number of years in Taiwan working on a power plant project. While there, I was fortunate to have met some every interesting Taiwanese students at Feng Chia University in Taichung. They escorted me all over the countryside even spending nights at their family homes. I would provide the car and English lessons and they would teach me Mandarin and show me the beauty of their country. I have been many places and seen things that Americans seldom get to see in all parts of Taiwan. I have been to shrimp farms on the coast, family centers in the mountains, to water falls and tropical jungles. I will share some of my adventures in this and future blogs. To begin, Taichung is located on the western coast of Taiwan along the Taiwan Strait. It is almost half way down the coast from the northern capital of Taipei. A major freeway connects Taipei, Taichung, and Tainan to the south. (Taiwanese for north is pei, center is chung, and south is nan). ...
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February 14, 2010 Introduction

Welcome to my new blog. I will be entering stuff about my travels past present and future. Happy Chinese New Year 4708 and Happy Valentine's Day 2010! My wife is from Taiwan and her chinese birthday is in the year of the Tiger! We hope to visit Taiwan this year we have not been back since 2001. As for myself I have been traveling for 6 decades now just starting number 7. I have had the wunderlust since I was 5 months old and my family did a road trip to Long Island to visit cousins. I have pictures of me as a young kid at the beach fishing and yes that first trip laying on a blanket in our cousin's front yard. I really don't remember many of those first trips. Not until I was 8 years old and we vacationed in upstate NY. The historical forts of William Henry and Ticonderoga as well as the North Pole in the Adirondack Mountains of NY. It was a real pole with an ice coating from a refrigerator unit that was frozen over even during our July visit. Well I plan to start this blog...
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