Taiwanese-American: Not Entirely Either

He is a Red-eared Slider Turtle and named after Lee-Hom Wang, an Asian superstar. How we obtained him is a long story.

Yesterday was National Double Ten Day, so instead of doing celebratory patriotic stuff, we decided to go to Danshui for the day. There was unbelievable traffic, but we walked around the area filled with cute little shops and street vendors in the on-and-off again drizzles of rain. The whole point of places like these is that you’re supposed to arrive hungry, so you can just buy a variety of snacks like lamb-meat-on-a-stick, etc. here and there. We took a boat across the river and back again and saw the great Pacific Ocean.

After a few hours, we headed back towards home, stopping at El Gallo, a Mexican restaurant in TienMu for dinner. It was amazing beyond words. Jen & I have been craving Mexican food for so long, and we finally found a place with pretty authentic food.

After dinner, we stopped at ShihLin Night Market which was also packed. People everywhere all the time, you seriously just can’t get away from it at all. Anyways, we saw these little tubs filled with fishes and turtles where you can sit and “fish”.

You pay $100 for five of those fishing sticks to hook a turtle. (The process is totally humane, if not a bit traumatizing for the turtles to be flying through the air.) But the line breaks easily, so you have to buy more, and if you hook 14, then you get a free turtle. We spent $300 just to get 14+ turtles, so the lady let us pick one. We then had to buy the house and turtle food for it, which was another $310. We spent a total of $610 for Leehom, so we’re hoping he’ll live for a long long time.