Ho Yoon Yee's December holiday reflection

DAY 1
This December holiday, I went to Taiwan for the first time in my life. The trip lasted for 10 days, from 11-21/11. On the first day, my family  and I boarded the plane with the tour group we were joining. It had been a long time since I took a plane! It was going to be a four hour flight to Taiwan. Once we arrived we met our tour guide and took a maglev train from Taoyuan airport to Hsinchu. The train was really smooth and fast. It got dark at around 5:30pm and we headed to Fengjia night market for dinner. I ate a cheesy potato a bowl of noodles and sour plum powder sweet potato fries for dinner. It might sound  like a weird combination  but the fries were really delicious. That was the end of my first day in Taiwan.
DAY 2
We started to head for Taichung. We visited the famous Sun Moon Lake, Wen Wu temple and Birthday steps. I learned a lot about Taiwan, like the 921 earthquake that destroyed the very place that I was at, and the proper way of ebonite ring and leaving a temple in Taiwan. My favorite was the Birthday steps, which were very interesting. We had to walk down a flight of steps, each step had a date on it and famous people who were born on that date. The steps started at 31/12. After lunch we started to head up to Alishan. Along the way I learned a lot about the history of Taiwan during the Japanese occupation and what they were doing up there at Alishan.  Alishan is a mountain deep within the mountain range, so to get there we needed to bypass many other mountains. We stopped at FenQiHu, which is a old train stop, that is part of the long railroad leading up to Alishan build by the Japanese. Most of the railroad had been destroyed by an earthquake and is no longer in service. FenQiHu is a small town that is rich with history. Back in its heyday, whenever the train arrived, the locals will try to sell their lunchboxes (with food) to the people on the train. We tried the traditional train cakes there. Finally, we reached somewhere near Alishan. It's was quite chilly and as I have never experienced this before it felt weird. We followed our tour guide for a tour of the Alishan forest park. There were many interesting features there. For example, only two kinds of trees grow there and it is because of this quality wood that the japanese hacked down many trees and sent them down the mountain via train. We saw trees that grew from the same root, trees that looked like various objects and trees that were more that 1000 years old! I was amazed that, even though the temperatures were quite low, my nose was not blocked and it fact I could breathe better.