Real Live Actual Taiwan Pictures

OK, remember the trip down to Taroko Gorge?  Here's my photos from the day trip:

First, the Hualien airport.  Which is a small local airport handling commuter flights.  And looks an awful lot nicer than most commuter-type airports I've seen.  Largely because the main industry in the area is marble.

I mean, this was the bathroom for cryin' out loud.

(I probably shouldn't think about bathrooms right now, as my remodel is, of course, ongoing.  It would've come awful close to finishing today, if I'd settled for the wrong shower door.  But, I mean, if I've gone this far, I might as well wait for the right door.  Enough about my shower.  Back to Hualien.)

So.  Before we went to Taroko Gorge, we went to a marble factory where they process the marble from the gorge.  Some people on the tour were underwhelmed by the factory, but I was kinda impressed by it.  Just piles and piles of these huge slabs of marble.

So, finally, we actually go to the gorge. 

I mentioned that it's narrow, right?

Get a load of this one.  We're looking down into a (rather grayish) river.  And that's just marble right around it.  Never really thought about where marble comes from.

After we left the gorge (and the shop where we had to buy stuff), we had a little time to kill, so Mr. Su took us to a nearby beach for a few minutes.  They had some cute (and bizarre) sculptures there.  I liked this one, of a tail:

Then there was this one, which we also thought might've been of a tail:

When we were walking on the path to the water, I noticed some sort of military installation on the other side of the street.  And I felt like I was on the border of two completely different worlds -- the beach side had a pretty blue sky, and nature, and sculptures; and the other side had a foreboding wall and grey skies.  I swear to you -- I was standing in exactly the same spot (and just turning my head) when I took these two pictures:

Weird, huh?