A delicious interactive travel journal
In 2009, my girlfriend and I visited her home country of Taiwan. During our two week vacation, I wrote daily notes of my experiences and together we took over a thousand photos. Those notes and photos have been compiled into this interactive travel journal.
In preparation for my trip to Taiwan, I consulted the Lonely Planet's Taiwan travel guide (ISBN: 978-1-74104-548-2). The book might be best for someone who is going to be traveling light and touring all over the island (perhaps a college kid backpacking on vacation) but I found some of it to be really useful.
Taiwanese food can be very different. The base ingredients include many fruits, vegetables, and animal parts that we in the Western Hemisphere are not familiar with. The "Eating China" website provides a great primer on Taiwanese cuisine and links to several recipes.
According to documentation provided by Wikipedia regarding Unicode and HTML, "HTML is designed such that it is possible to represent characters from the whole of Unicode inside an HTML document by using a numeric character reference" in order to avoid the potential problems caused by legacy encodings. A numerical character reference is "a sequence of characters that explicitly spell out the Unicode code point of the character being represented".
In order to ensure proper rendering of the Traditional Chinese and Pinyin characters in this journal, the numeric character references have been used. The following websites have been valuable in determining the proper decimal values for all special characters.
My travel journal contains one entry for each day of my trip. The date of each entry is based on the Taiwanese calendar. Their calendar begins in 1911, which is the year Dr. Sun Yat-Sen established the Republic of China. As a result, the western year 2009 is year 98 on the Taiwanese calendar. I have attempted to follow the standard ordering of the date numerals, starting with the year (年, nián), then the month (月, yuè), and finally the day (日, rì).
Design, Text, Code: © Copyright 2009, 2010 by Aaron Pinero except as noted.
Photographs may not be used in any other medium without permission. In most cases, we'd be glad to let you if you ask.