Day 10 - Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village

Today’s Programme
Morning	Puli Brewery Factory / Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village
Afternoon
Evening	A Singing Competition
Hotel	Sun Wang Hotel, Pu Lee

I woke up early and rushed to the Wen Wu temple to take pictures because I didn’t spend much time there the day before. This temple is the only temple in Taiwan that imitates the style of the Ming Qing Forbidden city. Unfortunately, it was raining and I couldn’t spend more time in the temple but had to rush to the bus.

The original plan for that day was to visit the Puli Brewery Factory, but I guess we skipped that program because it was raining. It was good anyway because we directly headed for the Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village which was very nice. On arrival, they had the Opening ceremony show at the front gate. We were excited because the guys wore small pants like underwear :-D

The show guys lightened the fire and told us to jump across the fire to enter to the amusement. They gave us free time in the morning to play everything we wanted on the ground level. We were asked not to go to the top level in the morning. I was happy even if it was raining. The playing machine I liked was the UFO (Gyro Drop). I played it 4 times as I wanted to play it since years ago. We sat around the pole on the thing like an UFO. It took us higher and higher until it reached the highest level (It was about the tenth floor of a normal building), then dropped the UFO down to the ground very fast. The scenario from the UFO was wonderful. Unfortunately I was afraid that my camera may get damaged if I take pictures when I was on the top. I like being on it but I wish it was higher. I was about to feel like shocked then I reached the ground. It was too fast. All of the machines there were like for kids younger than me. The roller coaster called Mayan Adventure was great but its route was too short too. I was screaming then it stopped. I felt like I need more time on it. Another machine I enjoyed was called the Gold Mine Adventure which was 15 meters long and a water splashing train heading down steep with 40 degrees. (I played it like 6 or 7 times)

We had the 7-11 lunchbox again but this time it wasn’t that great like on the day before. We took the Skyline cable car for less than 10 minutes to the top of the hill after lunch. The top of the hill was cloudy. The place looked like heaven because of the cloud. I climbed to the fifth floor of the Observation Tower. It was so beautiful taking a look down the hill. We had to walk down the hill to visit all aborigine villages which are the Paiwan, the Ami, the Tao, the Rukai, the Puyuma, the Bunun, the Tsou (Shao), the Atayal, and the Saisiat. Some villages provided shows. Some only had ancient houses to let us take pictures. I realized that all the show guys in every area were the same set of people. They had a show at the entrance, at the Aladdin Pavilion, at the villages, then at the entrance hall for the ending ceremony. They really worked hard!

I didn’t bother watching the Ending ceremony ‘cos I wanted to go to the European garden which is in front of the Entrance hall. The garden was extremely beautiful. The Ritz Palace was big and enchant. I wish I could spend more time there ‘cos I was in hurry and only had a chance to take a couple of pictures before running back to the meeting point. I realized later that it was filmed as Dao Ming Shi’s house in my favorite Taiwanese series, Meteor Rain. If I knew earlier, I would have took tons of pictures there :-(

In the evening we had disco and a beauty contest of a boy, a girl, and a “La Mei (= hot chick)” from each group. The theme of my group was “Bed time”. The representatives of our group were Jack, P’Gift, and Un. P’Gift wore PJ carrying cute dolls. Jack also wore PJ with a puppy make up. He was so adorable, especially when he was playing with tiny chick doll. (He did that as in Thailand, we have a Thai phrase saying something like “Dog teases chicken” to refer to flirting.) Un, that is not gay, represented La Mei with sexy make-up. He came up with chilies and acted like he was really gay. Another two groups’ La Meis were real guys that acted like gay too. The funniest thing was that one of the male Fu Dao Yuan dressed and had a make-up and joined the La Mei competition. We couldn’t stop laughing. However, when voting, it looked like none of my group’s representatives got a high score :( but well they didn’t announce the results anyway.


We had a small problem with the room that night. When I went to meet my friend in another room, Nat, my roommate, thought that I was in the room and wanted to tease her by not opening the door. So, she strongly pushed the door. It turned out that she could open the door even if it was locked. We had to ask them to fix the door. While the room service was fixing it, we, for fun, kept saying that we want to change the room with Suite room as apology, but the service guy didn’t seem to understand English hehe. A couple of minutes later, it was fixed. We tried pushing the door strongly and we couldn’t get in. When they left, we found that strongly pushing the door does not open the door, only softly pushing does, but we were too lazy to call them to fix it as we only spent a night there.