Now arriving et... Jinguashi!
    In my quest to visit places in Taipei County that I've neglected, I decided to visit Jiufen. The attraction there is that it's a shopping street where you see "the olden times" and I'm told they have a museum whose star attaction is a bar of gold. Getting there is a pain in the ass and hell of complicated, and you start out by taking a train to the small town of Ruifang, which didn't actually look half bad. Across the street they have a "Well Come" grocery store with NT$6 water!!! Then you wait for a bus that takes you up the hill and along twisty mountain roads to Jiufen and Jinguashi. Once I saw Jiufen from the bus I decided it didn't look like much fun- a bunch of tour buses, crowds of tourists, and very bored-looking shopowners watching TV while selling "regional products". So I stayed on the bus.
    I think Jinguashi was more interesting (I was also kinda interested to see a twon with a three-syllable name, which you rarely encounter). It was an old mining town and now you just sort of walk around. In fact, some high school kids shouted to me: "Hello! Where are you going?" and I said "Just walking around." (Then they went and hid). I climbed up a mountain to a Shinto shrine and got pretty cold in the mist and fog and came back down and got chased by a bunch of stray dogs. Then I went home in another convoluted bus and train trip.
    The most annoying thing about this little trip was that on the local train they announce all the stops in Mandarin and what I assume is Taiwanese and Hakka. Then they say in English, with a prerecorded North American male voice: "We are now arriving at:!" followed by another voice saying the station. The problem is that this particular North American who they got to record this thing pronounced "at" as "et" (quite clearly "εt") which just drove me up the wall every time it came on (about 25 times each way). Who on earth would want to say "εt" for at? Is it some Canadianism I don't know about?
    Wall, thet's all for now.