Today is the second day of the Hualien trip. I got up after 8 a.m., because my mom said we’d go cycling in the morning. The route to Ji-li was the same one we rode in 2004, but it’s very different now. There’s construction everywhere along the roads. I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to visit Hualien wait until the end of the year. I saw signs saying the construction won’t finish until December. If you ride here now, you may have to ride along the roadside and share the road with gravel trucks, which is dangerous. Also, since the hotel offers free bicycles, I simply got them from the hotel. I regretted it afterward. The hotel’s bikes are terrible. I only rode 3 kilometers before my hands got sore (my hands, not my legs = =), and they’re still sore now……….

Around 10 a.m., I went to Qixingtan with my mom’s coworker (and of course my brother~). My mom was there on a business trip, so she still had work from 10:00 to 14:00. That’s why she asked her coworker to take us out to play. Qixingtan was very quiet today. I thought there would be lots of mainland tourists, but there were very few people, not the crowds I had imagined. Still, if it were crowded, I don’t think Qixingtan could keep its clean image, right? At about 11 a.m., a tour group from Taipei arrived. My mom’s coworker sneaked a look at the sign on their group’s banner and found out they were a graduation trip group from Neihu High School XD. We played with stones there. My class used stones to spell words on our graduation trip too, so this time I spelled a character, 風 (wind)~

▲▲Qixingtan, where the mountains meet the sea ▼▼Behind Qixingtan is an Air Force base. There are airplanes parked there. I heard you can sometimes see the Mirage 2000 fighter jets. ▼▼I think this is called the light-sculpture stage ▼▼The big rocks at Qixingtan

▲▲Do you know what character this is? ▼▼The simplified-character version of 風 XD

▼▼Neihu High School graduation trip ▼▼The sea at Qixingtan is so beautiful. I actually edited this one. The light wasn’t this good when I took it.

▲▲Playing with stones, seeing who can stack them higher XD ▼▼I stacked mine like building a house~ Three stones made mine taller than the other two people’s^^

For lunch we ate at a famous place, Lao Zhou steamed dumplings (I actually forgot what it was called, and I only found out from my brother @@). I thought it was pretty good. We had steamed dumplings and xiaolongbao for lunch. In the afternoon we went to Taroko Gorge, and we were back at the hotel to rest by about 2:00. The weather in Hualien was perfect, though it was so hot at noon that I couldn’t stand it. I heard it was pouring rain in Taipei.

▲▲Back at the hotel, playing on the computer = = ▼▼The weather is great, so hot I could die

At 2:30, my mom came back and said we were going to a place called Lintianshan. I’d never been there, but we didn’t actually get to Lintianshan, because it started raining as soon as we got there = = So we only took a few photos and went back to downtown Hualien for dinner, and bought some local specialties to eat along the way :D

▲▲Lintianshan forestry, and so on ▼▼I thought it was a stinking ditch at first, but it turned out to be a very clear stream XD

Since someone asked for a selfie XD, here it is. Please leave a comment~