My new blog

Hello all.
I've got a new blog. It's www.rogergordon.net/blog
I'm also studying Chinese. Check www.rogergordon.net/chinese to see my progress (or lack of it :p)

THANK YOU

Thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to visit my blog during the last 2 years, and especially those who have posted comments. If you would like to email me, my email address is

'roger' and then 'gordon' and I'm at 'gmail dot com'. There are no spaces in my address. Sorry to make it so cryptic, but if I just give it to you, I'll get lots of spam mixed in with your friendly emails!

I'm not out of touch, just not posting on this blog anymore. I'll be adding stuff to my site in future and I'm trying to expand it as much as possible, so have a look periodically.

Closing...

I've left Taiwan. Sad as it was to go, I'm enjoying living in South Africa again. I'm trying to get into web design and as a start I've made my own page at my own domain. If you're interested, you can take a look at

www.rogergordon.net

It's not the best, but it's a start.

Long way down - Taipei 101 part 2

89 floors, to be exact. Amazingly, the elevator takes 35 seconds to get up or down.

Taipei 101

I had been there before, but never at night. Amazing is all I can say. The view is unbelievable.

New phone

I got a new one! I can read the Bible and listen to MP3's on it at the same time. For those interested in the model, it's a Motorola ROKR E2.

Alishan 4

Art class.

Alishan 4

Here's one of my favourite photos from the trip - it's a happy kid with a game of 'pass the rubber band to your friend using a straw in your mouth' going on in the background.

Alishan 3

Here's picture of a funny game my friend Grace designed for the kids which consisted of blowing a ping pong ball out of a bowl of flour. It was so funny to watch!!

Alishan 2

Moonrise... without a tripod - man, I was annoyed with myself! Well here's a blurry shot to give you an idea anyway.

Alishan 1

My company (Hess Educational Organisation) has a 'foundation' which they put money into in order to help kids in Taiwan who don't have much. I went up to Alishan (Ali Mountain) a week or two ago to help out and had a great time with some good kids. Having a 5 and 12-year-old in the same classroom proved to be a little difficult to control, especially since my Chinese is so bad, but it was great fun anyway. Here's a pic of the kind of view you get from the little school in the Mountains.

Yakiniku

is the general term for (Japanese?) barbecue restaurants in which you pay a set fee and get to barbecue/braai as much food as you want to for an hour and a half. I've been to a few of them recently and can highly recommend them to the meat hungry visitor on a budget. Normally an evening at one of these restaurants costs about US$13 or so.

Friends

I never put photos on this blog that I don't think are relevant to a stranger visiting this site. Well today is a little different. Here are some of my buddies from work.

Cheers, Craig and Jo!

A belated farewell to two of my best friends here in Taiwan, Craig and Jo. They will both be sorely missed!

My church

...just got a website. Visit it at www.taichungchristianchurch.com Here's a picture of a hand and the rest of church during one of our Sunday morning worship services. Oh and if anyone is looking for a Bible based non-denominational church that has bilingual everything, come along and visit us. Address details are on the church website.

Taichung Science Park - again

Here's another photo using the 'Taiwan- ancient and modern' theme. In the foreground you see a large pagoda styled building and in the background is a huge high tech factory which I'm presuming is a chip fabrication plant.

Jade Mountain 9

The summit of Taiwan's tallest mountain at 5:44am. The most amazing site I've ever seen - pity these photos don't capture the beauty of the place at all...

Jade Mountain 8

At the second lodge known as Paiyun lodge, I again got to witness one of the most fantastic night skies of my life. This is my first attempt at doing 'star trails' - long exposure photographs of the night sky. This was a 30 minute exposure which got a bit too bright due to what I can only guess was the light from the milky way.

Jade Mountain 7

All the trees in this one forest were growing one way only I guess to face the sun. Here's one of my new friends from the small tour group we were with.

Jade Mountain 6

The cold weather and high altitude means that things decompose really slowly. Thus, when a tree had died, its bark falls off, leaving the wood to be bleached by the sun.

Jade Mountain 5

Some fantastic scenery - just one of hundreds of pictures I took of the area.

Jade Mountain 4

And when the sun finally set and the clouds moved away, I got to see the brightest night sky of my life.

Jade Mountain 3

Our group was blessed with beautiful scenery right from the start of the tour. Here's a spectacular sunset at 'Tataka', the first lodge one stays in when attempting to summit Jade Mountain.

Jade Mountain 2

The roads around Taiwan aren't that stable due to the torrential rains, precipitous geography and seismic activity. Nevertheless Taiwan is covered with thousands of amazing engineering models in the form of roads in places that other countries wouldn't even consider. Things do go wrong sometimes and as you can see in this photo, we had to hang around waiting for a road barrier to be erected after heavy rains had washed away a portion of the road.

Jade Mountain 1

I went to Jade mountain 2 weeks ago. Jade mountain is Taiwan's tallest and is so called because of it's summertime green hue. The summit is 3952m high, and the area around it is very beautiful indeed and definitely not to be missed if you are in Taiwan for even a short time. I had such a good time that the Jade Mountain area is my new favourite place on earth. While travelling to the first lodge (known as 'Tataka') our tour group stopped at a restaurant. This old man decided that my foreign face was quite a novelty and warranted a 'Hellooo' from the table opposite. He was too cute not to have a photo taken with. Funnily, 2 or his relatives were about to kill each other over a financial argument regarding their inheritance at the same time, but he didn't seem too concerned...

Thanks for visiting!

Wow! I've had over 10000 unique hits on this website since it started nearly 2 years ago. Thanks a lot to everyone who has visited and has put up with my inconsistant posting style. It's been great so far and I hope to continue posting as long as possible!

Not exactly beautiful...

Taiwan's urban landscape consists of a lot of THIS.

Noise

Taichung, once it wakes up, is really noisy. It's so noisy that you can't even hear the huge amount of air traffic that passes overhead everyday. At 5am though, it seems that every jet on the island takes off at the same time, leaving a fantastic pattern of jet streams across the sky. I didn't manage to get a good picture of this pattern, but I did capture a plane making it's own streamer in the sky.

Good morning.

If you look at the time stamp of many of my posts, you'll see I'm quite a night-owl. I saw the entire night through the other day and watched the sun rise over the apartment block buildings surrounding my own. It was actually quite scenic...

Taichung Science Park

To attract money to the city of Taichung, the government has set aside a huge block of land for hi-tech factories. I found the soon-to-be-completed Taichung Technology Park the other day by mistake and was amazed by the incredible looking architecture and size of the various semiconductor foundries I saw there. The security guards were quite picky about photos and cameras, so I wasn't able to get too many decent pics, but hopefully this will give you an idea of the feeling of the place.