Crouching Tiger, Hidden Nerd Sword Shop

One of the definite benefits of choosing Taiwan instead of the many other foreign sites for this particular nursing class is that, unlike the majority of our fellow students, we have free days.  Quite a few, actually.  Thursday through Sunday are essentially free for us, so we get quite a bit of awesome travel experience! 


Friday we decided to take a lovely little train ride to downtown Tainan.  Jim (our instructor) wanted to take us to a particularly neat shop... Neater than I realized at first.  You see, the place he wanted to take us was a sword shop.  Not just any sword shop; the shop of the last remaining sword-maker in Taiwan.  This sword-maker follows the ancient tradition of placing human bones in the fire used to create the sword.  Because bones contain a significant amount of phosphorus, they tend to create a flame that tempers the steel in a way that it's more free from impurities.  Cool, right?  Wrong.  That is just part of why this guy is so cool.  You see, apart from making the swords seen in this picture...

He also made this sword...

 IT'S THE FETCHING GREEN DESTINY!!!!!


That's right, the legendary sword from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was, in fact, made by this Taiwanese sword-maker.  The one who's shop I was in.  It was like nerd paradise.  Seriously, who gets that kind of opportunity?  As you can see, I was pretty stoked! 

Like I said, nerd paradise.