Have you ever seen Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away? If you haven’t then you should just go watch right now and then come back to this. Or maybe this post will inspire you to watch it? We’ll see how it goes. Anyways, back to the topic at hand, the Jiufen story. It all started when my friends and I decided to go hiking at a place called Teapot Mountain, which is said to be beautiful, but I won’t get to tell you all about it just yet, because we didn’t make it there yesterday.
One of my friends was late, so we ended up missing two of the busses that could have taken us there. By the time we got on the bus, we figured it was too late to be able to make it to the top on time. So we settled and went to Jiufen, with the idea that we might be able to go up a hill in close proximity and still feel like we were exercising. The weather was perfect, with no rain and perfectly blue skies. We decided we should first have lunch and then go up the hill.
But as chance would have it, the weather changed and when we left the restaurant. It was cold and dark clouds loomed everywhere. We were able to walk around, try out samples of wines, teas and snacks, but then it started drizziling and that was the end of the possibility of hiking. We found a nice bar and settled in to try different craft beers, and watch the rain fall. It was a completely different afternoon to what we had planned but it was still quite pleasant.
Oh, just realized I never told you why I asked about you watching Spirited Away, it turns out Jiufen is the place that inspired the setting for the movie and it’s quite the similarity is quite uncanny. So I do hope you get to enjoy a nice cup of tea or a cold beer when you eventually visit, because you will? Right?
