Miao is back!!!! This time as Count DraMiaocula

Happy Halloween Everyone!!!!!

Prequel..

Hehehe…seems like our Jason haven’t back from Taiwan yet…

Let’s have some fun with his blog..

That’s all for my introduction. See you guys soon in my upcoming post. :)

Promote promote :P

More miao at Miao’s nest.

I didn’t know the exact reason why I picked Taiwan as my holiday destination, but one thing that I knew for sure was that, I didn’t want to go to anywhere within South East Asia.

At the same time, Sam Tham introduced Taiwan to me and showed me a few really beautiful pictures of the many landscapes in Taiwan. I was interested then and probably, that was how I ended up in Taiwan with another three companions.

Jason Lioh, Jamie Lioh, Steve Liang Chee Yong (Ah Yong) and Yoon Oon (Chong).

Skipping the checking in, boarding the plane, taking off, sleeping, waking up, having in-flight meal, sleeping and waking up part, it was almost five hours later when I was finally welcomed by Taiwan. In-flight meal was just bleargh.

Click on the picture for a full size 3096 * 4023 resolution.

Welcome to Taiwan!

For youths who are traveling in Taiwan, it is very important that you register yourself at the airport’s information center for the Youth Travel In Taiwan program. You can get discounts for transportation, accommodations and sometimes, even food! Certain train lines is free of charge when you show them the “tag”.

We didn’t book any accommodation for our first night. Not knowing where to go to, where to stay and how to go, we did a very brief discussion on the spot and decided that we would try our luck by finding a hotel in Taoyuan 桃园 town itself.

Hurriedly, we made our way to the back of the airport where most buses would stop to pick up passengers. A kind hearted lady guided us to board the right bus and also to the right stop. The journey heading out to the city was rather dark and creepy as well, far from what I had expected of a big town like Taoyuan. I was starting to get anxious by then. However, after many bus stops and 30 minutes later, things started to look better and a big town was starting to look like a big town. Many cars and motorcycles, brightly lit streets, tall buildings and people rushing to cross the streets. Duh!

The bus dropped us off not too far from Taoyuan train station.

We went into a nearby hotel to look for a room. Unfortunately, it was fully booked. However, the manager was kind enough to refer us to another hotel which wasn’t too far from our location.

The hotel 长虹旅馆, for a room for four persons was priced at NT1800 on a Saturday night, still pretty reasonable. The room was rather kinky “weird” though. Let’s just skip that part. Haha!

We dropped off our ridiculously heavy bag and headed out for supper / dinner. As it was pretty late and not much restaurants were opened, we settled for braised stuffs (’Loh Bak’ 卤味) not too far just from my hotel. It’s actually a franchise in Taiwan, called Old Shanghai 老上海。

Braised stuffs are are like the national food for Taiwan. You can get them at anytime and anywhere. It’s practically almost everywhere and as long as its braise-able, it can be braised. Noodles, pork balls, chicken wings, duck eggs, intestines, sausages, pig skins, tofu, peanuts, duck meat, chicken meat, pork ribs and any other things you could come up with.

We, more like, I, took whatever I wanted to eat and handed it to the person in charge. They would then cook, braise and serve it with more sauce and some vegetables.

I am not going to write any reviews or comments for all the food that I / we had tried in Taiwan as I don’t think its fair for me / us to judge as it was our first time having Taiwanese food. I will just briefly write what are the items and some notes about the food. So, enjoy drool over the pictures!

There was a stall selling sausage at the junction and we stopped for a while to check it out. Apparently, you can gamble with the boss for NT50 and if your dice number is bigger than the stall owner, you get to win three sausages!

We called it a day, after getting our water supply at a nearby convenient store but that will be for another post.

By the time you read this post, I should be at 40,000 feet above sea level.

Blogging should resume a week after that.

Blissfulness…

G’day everyone. For some strange reasons our dearest Jason abandoned us temporarily and forced requested me to fill in this awesome place of his for the time being.

I am Robin from robinwong.blogspot.com and I will be crashing here for a bit, also probably trying to steal some of Jason’s limelight away from him right under his nose. Worry not, I am sure he would not mind anyway.

So the question that really bakes the noodles would be: what will I be doing here? Jason did not exactly give me any specific instructions, and basically he asked me to write my usual stuff, like how I would do with my own blog. What I have decided to do originally was to post up entries relating to topics and scopes that Jason has never, and will most probably never post up here. I was supposed to come up with a plan but in the end I was just too freaking lazy I figured out I should just go random and be myself.

In this particular entry, I shall dedicate it specifically on how I got to know Jason, and what horror he has done in my life so far.

We all have been reading this awesome blog for some time now, it has been around for years, and not much of a surprise, it has successfully garnered quite a distinctively respectable reputation. I too, was part of the crowd, and often find his food pictures unbearably tormenting when I was viewing his frequent food entries during lunch time at work, munching away just mere pathetic sandwiches. There were also times when I was not entirely alone, but my colleagues were standing behind me drooling, and somehow we all got hungry again though we had just finished our lunch. This was probably one of the largest sin that Jason has committed, and probably one of the most compelling reasons for many to come back to his blog for more.

One fine day, when I made a spontaneous trip down to Malacca to meet up with a few friends, I bumped into Jason for the first time. It was at the outdoor eatery near MMU, and I went over to his table to say… “Hi Jason, its Robin from robinwong.blogspot.com”. And he replied “Yes, I know.. aren’t you supposed to be in KL?” *gasp… I knew he visited my blog before but little did I know he actually kept track of it until then. And so it began, we kept in touch ever since.

One of the noteworthy traits about Jason is how he has always been persistently nudging me to get a DSLR. It is a known fact that Jason has been progressively improving his skills on camera, and somehow I believe he sees the urge to want everyone to move up the ladder too. He always commented on how I should be using a DSLR instead of a compact (point and shoot) camera, considering my immense interests in photography, and my constant complaints on the restrictions that the compact camera imposed on my pictures. Of course, there was the factor of money-never-enough-to-buy-dslr syndrome, until one day, he cursed my compact camera to die so I can move on and get a proper DSLR.

And my compact camera really died few days after that. I kid you guys not.

At that point of life I knew I could not survive without a camera. Hence the hunt for a replacement was in place, but I was leaning more towards prosumer (higher end point and shoot) cameras. I had my reasons, mainly because I was cashless, and felt inadequate in skills to handle a DSLR. That was when Jason flipped upside down and inside out and spent hours and hours on MSN trying to convince me on getting a DSLR for a few continuous nights in a row. I thought about it, really hard and thorough, but in the end, I decided to just go with a conventional compact camera. I told Jason.. and…

The next thing that happened was.. Jason called me all the way from Malacca and… I got lectured for an hour 20 minutes well it felt like an hour.

I could not get any sleep that night. What a horror !!!

As a consequence, in the end, I got my Ollie. (an Olympus DSLR)

Thanks to Jason, I have progressed much further now in photography having a DSLR in hand. I am still new, but I am learning much quicker than previously. There are many things that I have not mastered in basic photography, but I am steadily improving. There are heaps of “WOW” factor producing pictures from a DSLR, and I guess Jason just wants to share that with everyone.

There would probably be a hundred more things to say about Jason, so many stories too but I think it would be wrong to bore his readers to death. Amongst all the things I have come across with him, that particular phone call that night probably was the most memorable one. Sometimes I still shiver thinking of it.

So people, faithful readers of Jasonmumbles dot com, if you have got something to say about him bad one also can lah please speak up in the comment section. He is away from his blog now, so I believe it would be nice for him to see how he has impacted his readers, even in simple and small ways.

I will be back. Cheers !!