Toucheng

Today was 80 degrees and sunny so I went to the beach in Toucheng with a few other people which is about a 2 hour train ride from where I live. Waking up to go to the beach wasn't easy by I managed. I took a taxi to the train station to meet up with the other people and we all hopped on the train at 9:30am.

There are different "levels" of trains in Taiwan: local, slow, and fast (I think). The local train stops at every single station, the stow train stops at a few less stations, and the fast train doesn't stop at that many stations. However, I'm not sure which train we got. If you don't pre-order your train ticket, you may have to stand depending on how many other people buy tickets before you. The tickets all cost the same but if you pre-order, you are assigned a seat, making traveling much more comfortable. Since we bought our tickets 5 minutes before the train left, we had to stand.

When we got to Toucheng, we got some food and took a taxi to a little part of Toucheng that had a nice stretch of beach and a few good waves because one of the guys is a surfer. There is a nice little surf shop right by the beach that is owned by a few Taiwanese guys who also live there. They are incredibly nice and let my friend keep his surfboard and wet suit there and even let him shower there after he's done surfing. While he surfed, the rest of us just did beach-y things and got some sun. We eventually went back to the surf shop, cleaned up, went back to the train station, and took the train to Taipei.

In Taipei, we met up with a couple other people and got some food at Xi Men Ding. By this point it was getting late so I hopped on the MRT and took a bus home. The bus usually drops me off right in front on my apartment but today, for some reason, it took a different route and dropped me off about 10 minutes away from my apartment. No big deal...until it started POURING rain. I was going to take a shower anyway but mother nature beat me to it.