Our day at the Beach

On Stacey's 3rd day we went to the beach. One of the things on Stacey's list of things to do in Taiwan was to go to a beach and relax in the sun. Baishawan beach was listed in the Lonely Planet book as on of the best beaches to go to in Northern Taiwan. Baishwan translates to "white sand bay."


Isn't this beautiful? Why is there no one on the beach? Because this picture is off the internet.

We did not experience such picture perfect weather on the day we visited. Our view of the beach looked more like this....


When we arrived we realized that the sun was not very bright and we looked behind us to see a large dark rain cloud moving closer towards the beach.

Despite the possibility of getting caught in more rain, we decided to make the most of it and enjoy ourselves at the beach.

We wanted to go into the water and I proceeded to strip down to my bathing suit when I looked around and saw this...

What do you notice here? There are some men in bathing suits but NO women are in bathing suits. They would be going into the water completely clothed. At that moment it occurred to me that I might be completely offending everyone on the beach and put my clothes back on and told Stacey, "I think I just exposed myself to the beach. There are no women in bathing suits."

After we looked very carefully around us, we could not find any women in bathing suits. We went to a local woman on the beach who had sold us our beach mat to see if we could ask her if it was okay for us to wear bathing suits. However, my limited vocabulary did not help us very much so Stacey decided to try to ask using charades and body language.

Here is Stacey trying to explain that everyone on the beach has clothes on.


Here is Stacey trying to draw stick figures in the sand; one person with cloths on and one person with a bathing suit on.


Our efforts did not get us the information we needed. We did find out where to change our clothes and where to buy bathing suits but that's about it.

Later, we met a local couple and she was wearing a bathing suit top. We asked her if it was okay for us to wear bathing suits (with limited vocabulary and charades) and determined that it would be okay. We later played some volleyball with them and took a series of pictures.


After playing volleyball and hearing thunder getting louder we decided to bring our beach day to a close.

On the way home we stopped by a local bread store. Taiwan is famous for their bread stores and having a lot of them. There are an estimated 2,000 bread stores in the Taipei area alone. They carry a variety of bread that look very interesting. We decided to get all the bread we thought looked good and try it.

Stacey and I did not keep track but, we probably ended up trying about 15 to 20 different types of bread during her visit.