Day Two began with a very slow start. We relaxed over coffee in our suite and wandered out to the pool deck to eat some delicious overnight oats. As we enjoyed our breakfast we hatched a plan for the day. We had discussed walking around town but it was obvious the day was extremely hot and humid and we might want to modify our plans.
Above Keelung, from the harbor, stands Goddess Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. She has been staring at us from our side of the ship and I felt compelled to see her up close. That said, we hailed a taxi and he drove us to the tippy top of the mountain above Keelung. She is located in Zhongzheng Park. The park offered beautiful lookouts over the harbor. Additionally, to our Goddess was yet another temple! Imagine that. Each of these Buddhist temples offers a chance to pray. Today, I sent one up to my mother as this was the day she passed, April 2nd. There was also a very large gong that welcomed anyone so choosing, to ring it. No surprise…Joe stepped right up and gave it two big swings with the rope attached. I hope my mama heard our prayers and the call of the gong in remembrance.
After arriving back to the ship we took what has become a rare opportunity to relax by the pool and read. We ran into our new neighbor we acquired in Hong Kong. We had been teasing him that he really didn’t have a wife as we had several days go by before meeting her. They are lovely people who live in Acapulco, Mexico. He told us that the previous night she slipped and fell on the dance floor and broke her shoulder. Yikes! We are discovering that the ship’s doctor is a necessity and one we hope to avoid. They will decide (as she is medicated today) whether they will continue onward or disembark in Japan. I guess we can count ourselves lucky (so far) that we haven’t had any incidents or accidents that would require us to leave our voyage earlier than planned. Fingers crossed that the rest of our journey is without incident. We are just beginning to sail away from Keelung on our way to Miyakojima, Japan and Okinawa. The captain has advised that the sea may be a little rough tonight but I don’t tend to mind that..it rocks me to sleep.
Today’s fun fact: Joe has become a pro at using Google translate on his phone. He holds it over the characters and it translates to English. You can see him doing so in this first picture. In addition to being my technology guy on the trip, he has now taken on the role of translator. Sometimes…it doesn’t quite translate and we giggle about the way it comes to the phone in English. For instance, he just came in from the pool with a beer labeled Taiwan Beer. Holding the phone over the characters it translated to, “Taiwan Beer”. He said, “they seem pretty focused on that.” 🙂
Get it on, bang a gong get-on. That was my T Rex moment.
I just want to say that all of the Taiwanese people that I met and listened to are very proud of their “country”. I put this in quotes because this place sits in limbo on that particular point. They deserve to be proud. This place is clean, the roads are good, the people like and respect each other. The economy they have built is providing for their people. A very nice place.
