Author RenegadeTourist
Back in May I wrote this article about building a passive AC. That time I attached it to the front of our living room fan and I found that while the principle worked the air flow was too low to give effective cooling. I also mentioned that I would like to try to fit one in a window to cool down the incoming air. Now, I’ve finally had a chance to test this concept.
The working principle is the same, as the air passes through the funnel it gets compressed which lowers the temperature. Last time I used standard 500 … Read the rest
The dreariness of my evening commute has been instantly dispelled by a marvelous sky. A pale blue background, bordering on yellow, richly strewn with tufts of cloud like pieces of cotton on a blue tablecloth. The clouds lie in shadow but are lit from underneath by the setting sun, painting them dark grey on one side and a brilliant hue of pinkish orange on the other. The contrasting colors make every little wisp of vapor stand out against the background, making the clouds seem bigger and fuller, while at the same accentuating the orange light, making it look as if the entire sky is filled with a brilliantly shining fire. It is little moments like this that make the drudgery of every day life bearable.
Shimen Reservoir is a big man-made lake in the mountains outside Taoyuan City. It is a popular tourist destination known for its beautiful views of the lake and the surrounding mountains, and nowadays there are more than ten distinct tourist attractions in the area. As everyone knows, with tourists come business opportunities, and a number of hotels, restaurants and cafés have sprung up along the lake shore. In the past it was common for visitors to stay overnight but as transportation improved, especially with the construction on the No. 3 highway, the market for hotels has gone down. As a … Read the rest
We all have prejudices and we all tend to use stereotypes when we think about “other people”, at least to some degree. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but I do think it’s good to be mindful, both of the prejudices you have about others, and the prejudices others might have about you. With that in mind I am writing this post to inform my readers how Taiwanese people tend to view “foreigners”. First a quick disclaimer, I cannot claim to be presenting scientific facts here, this is merely based on my own experience of living here … Read the rest
My company has sent me on a business trip to Milano. While I haven’t taken any time off for traveling like I did last time I came here for business, I’ve spent what little free time I have exploring as much as I can of northern Italy.
Milano
Last time I was in Milano I crossed the main tourist spots off the list. This time I was here with a different colleague so I ended up revisiting a few of them, and adding a few others.
The Milan cathedral, or Duomo as it is known in Italian, is of course … Read the rest
The gorge is like a deep fissure in the ground, carved by the water over thousands of years. The walls are uneven, shaped by the flow of the water, with patches of moss growing here and there. In front of me is the waterfall, a stream of white water that comes crashing down into the creak below, throwing spray high into the air and filling the cave with mist that makes it nearly impossible to take a photo. I let my gaze follow the walls upwards to the small hole high above where the stream flows into the cavern. As the water tumbles over the edge it breaks into little droplets, forming clouds that billow in the air like smoke in time with the rush of air and whoosh of the water as it comes down.
It's not a proper thunder shower yet, but the rain is still pretty heavy, big drops pelting me as I go along. Speed always amplifies the force of the drops, normally it starts to feel painful when you go above 60 kph and now I'm already doing a little over 90; every single drop hitting my chest or legs stings like a bullet from a BB gun - it's like riding through a barrage of machine gun fire. As if the pain wasn't enough, the thin rain jacket is woefully inadequate, I can feel myself becoming wetter with every second. For whatever reason - maybe it's because I've recently been reading a Finnish World War 2 novel - I react to the deep feeling of misery by repeatedly swearing in Finnish: Saatana Perkele, Saatana Perkele
A couple of weeks ago I was in a camping gear store looking for something when a man came up to me and asked something. I couldn’t really give him a proper answer but we started chatting and soon enough he had invited me to go river tracing. I’ve been interested in going for a while, but I’ve just never taken the time to arrange a tour, so when the opportunity came up like that, I happily agreed to join.
At first my wife was planning to join as well but she had some work to do so in the … Read the rest
A Boy Named Sue Montoya
A thought struck me the other day and I felt like it’s interesting enough, or perhaps funny enough, to be worth writing down. It is entirely possible that someone else has already thought of this but I’ve never heard of it, so here we go:
The characters of Sue from the Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue, and Inigo Montoya from the film The Princess Bride are incredibly similar. First, they have both been wronged in some way and in both cases the wrongdoing is strongly linked to their respective fathers. The boy named Sue gets teased for … Read the rest