Wanggong!

Once again we went on a little adventure this weekend! We went to a small town on the west coast called Wanggong. I loved it! It was beautiful! It was different than anything I've seen so far and I really liked it! Karyn, Kailey, Liz, Amy and I went on this little journey together :)

Welcome to Wanggong, my friends!

We had to walk a ways from the bus stop to the shore. But I loved it! This was the trail we walked on. Every once and a while, they had these cool walkways that you see pictured here. They weren't bridges, but they were just coverings.

They were a little shelter from the sun. It was nice, because there was nothing else around to shade us.

I really liked this cool, modern bridge we had to cross to get to the shore.

I thought Dad would like the lighthouse in this picture and Nate would like the wind mills :)

I liked these boats and those vehicles you see on the road behind the boats also went into the water.

Another awesome bridge!

Me and the lighthouse! We couldn't go inside, but it was still awesomeness!

I liked all of the textures in this picture. The grass and the plant and the logs and the rocks and the cement blocks and the sand and the water.

My feet in the Taiwan Strait!

The water was really shallow and you could go really far out there, walking or in the vehicles. Those are the vehicles we saw on the road in the few pictures above. Literally the water barely covered my feet in certain areas and you could go far out there.

Wind-blown hair and the beach! Those are people behind me on the left. They were far out there!

I loved this place! Isn't it beautiful?! We walked along the beach for a while and just hung out there watching the people and the boats and the crabs and the water. I enjoyed playing in the sand and looking for shells!

I loved the texture of the sand and the lighthouse in the background!

The windmills were close to the water!

Look at those little crabs! There were so many of them. But if you got anywhere near them, they would immediately and quickly run into their holes in the sand. I got this picture with the zoom on my camera.

I liked the sun shine, the bridge and the boats!

This was on our way back to the bus stop!

We didn't get to stay in Wanggong very long, but I highly enjoyed it! Like I said earlier, it's different than anything I've seen here. But I really liked it!

P.S. Sorry I'm not very descriptive in my writing. I have a hard time describing things with words sometimes and I think that might be why I take pictures so much. But I must say too that a lot of times, it's really hard to actually capture in a picture what I see with my eyes. If that makes any sense.

It's just not quite what I see with my eyes or it's not the whole picture, but it's close. I think also part of visiting a place is the feeling that you get while you are there and that is definitely something you cannot capture or even explain sometimes. Any way, I just wanted to tell you that.

P.P.S I love beaches! But I think I will save that for another post on another week!

Happy Buddha!

On Wednesday, we had school off because it was Moon Festival Day! YAY! No school in the middle of the week! It was a lovely day!

Liz, Kailey, Karyn and I went to Taichung and found this awesome temple that Liz and I had seen from a bus window, but did not get out and look at it. So we decided to go and check it out on Wednesday.

I think it's beautiful and it's different than other Buddhist temples. It's made of concrete and there's a bigger temple built over a smaller one.

It's not the best shot. But I like that the incense is sticking up and you can see the temple through the hole in the cauldron (I don't know what the thing is called that the incense is in.)

Here's a closer up look at the little temple inside the big temple. It's beautiful! I think it's a fairly new temple or at least it was recently renovated, because it was really nice!

Me in front of the temple!

This huge, happy Buddha happened to be next to the temple! This was actually the main reason we came here, but the temple was an added bonus! I loved the shot with the lady in the hat working in front of the Buddha!

Kissing the Buddha in Taichung, Taiwan! What can I say?! (September 2010)


I like big men :) Kissing the Sphinx in Cairo, Egypt! (September 2007)

Me with the Buddha! This thing is huge and so cute!

Wednesday was an awesome day! Moon Festival day celebrates the full moon and the beginning of fall each year. It's a big deal here that there's no school and people get off of work.

People often have barbecues with their families and friends. They set off fireworks and watch the moon.

We went up on the hill near our house and looked over the city on Wednesday evening and we saw hundreds of fireworks (literally) all over the city. It was beautiful! We also watched the moon for a bit too. It was shining so bright and it lit our way down the mountain. It was lovely!

Moon Festival BBQ!

Yesterday, Karyn, Liz, Kailey and I were invited to a student's house for a BBQ. What was the BBQ for, you ask?! Well it was for Moon Festival! Today is actually Moon Festival, but I think they kind of celebrate it the whole week. Moon Festival is celebrating the full moon tonight, which is also the first day of fall!

Karyn and I got to their house at around 4 PM and we did not leave until 11:30 PM. When we first got there we played Wii Fit and an intense game of tic-tac-toe on this big wooden board and where you have to get 5 in a row and Blokus! Some of the kids were playing a cooking game on the Wii.

Danny is on the left and Tim is on the right! They're brothers. Tim is one of my students in my 2A class! I wrote a little about him here. Their family is good friends with the family whose house we had the BBQ at.

This is Mimi! She is in Basic Reading. She is not actually my student. She is Karyn's student, but we were at her house for this BBQ! She's a little quiet, but so cute!

This is Ivy. She also is Karyn's student in 4A. She is Mimi's sister! They have the cutest family! Their parents are so kind and generous!

This is our indoor BBQ! They totally cooked all of the meat on this mini-stove/grill in the living room! I know you want to know what kind of meat they had... well they had shrimp, pork sausage, squid balls, rice sausage (literally rice in a casing like sausage), pork wrapped in lettuce, some sort of fish... and I think that might have been all (at least in the meat department.)

But it was funny because they would cook them and each time they would get finished with one, they would hand Karyn and I a piece of it to eat. And yes I did try all of them. I may not have eaten all of it (particularly the squid ball), but I did try all of them ;)

We had corn and shrimp and mushroom & vegetable soup and nectarines and chips (but they weren't just regular chips. They were chips with the texture of cinnamon toast crunch, but a peppery and a little spicy taste:) and all of the meat. There was so much food and we ate a lot! (It's hard to resist sometimes when they offer it to you rather than you just trying what you want.)

Kailey and Liz came later in the evening. They had classes later than Karyn and I did, so they came at around 7:30 PM.

After we ate and were stuffed to the gills, we went outside and played with sparklers and fireworks! It was so much fun!

Liz, me and Karyn with our sparklers!

Sparkler!

A little firework/sparkler!

Overall the BBQ was lovely! We really were immersed in the Taiwanese culture yesterday! They love parties with their family and friends on the holidays! They do BBQ s inside because most people do not have yards. They eat exotic foods (at least to us, they're exotic). They like to play Wii and card games. And they love fireworks and sparklers! Although the Taiwanese people have a different culture, they like the same things we do!

I will write more at a later time about our day today and about the Moon Festival!

Karaoke Outside Our Front Door! Literally!

Last night we came home from work and this stage was set up in the courtyard in front of our house. The stage was literally outside our front door!

Yes, my roommates and I sang karaoke on that stage :) We sang "Hey Jude" by the Beatles. It was awesome! It was my first time ever doing karaoke! What the experience! Singing Beatles on stage in Taiwan!

Today Liz and I went to Taichung! We had made some plans, but they didn't quite work out the way we planned, but we found some awesome things to see instead!
We saw this church from afar and took a closer look! The statue in the middle is of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. We thought it was beautiful!

This is the top of the church! The steeple on the right is interesting, because it's Mary with the baby Jesus on top of her with his arms outstretched.

Right after we saw the beautiful church, we saw some elders! I loved this, because they were totally at a stoplight waiting for it to change and this elder was talking to the man on the scooter, going the wrong direction.

The light changed and the elder had to get out of the way! I love the missionaries!

After we saw the elders we waited for the bus to take us where we wanted to go, but we didn't quite get there fast enough and the next bus wasn't for a while, so we changed plans and ended up going inside Chung Yo Department Store!

Chung Yo is not just an ordinary department store, but it is a huge 14- story department store. No joke, 14 stories! We were in there for about an hour and we didn't even scratch the surface ;)

After Chung Yo, we went to Taichung Park, where we sat for awhile to rest and to enjoy the beautiful scenery! While we were there an older Taiwanese man started talking to us in English. He spoke to us for about 30 minutes. (He was speaking most of that time ;) It was interesting!

In case you haven't noticed, I love the trees here! Here are some more trees that I love! This is in Taichung Park! Today was a lovely day, even though it didn't go as planned!

P.S. There's a typhoon heading our way!

Taipei- National History Museum and Botanical Gardens!

Yesterday, Whitney, Katy, and I woke up at 4 AM to catch the 5:30 AM bus to Taipei. (Whitney and Katy are from the other school that we came with from ILP. I spent the night at their apartment that night in Fengyuan). Thankfully I was able to sleep most of the way to Taipei. Once we got to Taipei, we took a taxi from the train station to the temple. We did a session. It was wonderful! I love the temple!

Then we met up with Laura, Kristi, Erin, Liz and Meg after they did baptisms (they came on a later bus) and we walked through Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, which is where the next couple of photos were taken. If you want to know more about Chiang Kai-shek, you can go this BBC website. We didn't look very long here, but it was beautiful!

This is the memorial mentioned and pictured above!

This is a path of rocks at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial. You're supposed to walk on it barefoot and it's supposed to help heal your body, because there are certain pressure points in your feet. I have this picture up so that you can see how long it is. (I didn't get the beginning of the path in the picture).

I walked on it. All of the way! It hurt, but I made it! (I can't say that I felt any better after walking on it, though;) (But one of the girls did say that her head stopped hurting after walking on it)

This is the beginning of my journey :)

I like these trees! The ones on the left are cactus trees. Actually there are lots of different kinds of trees in this picture. I could not tell you the name of any of them, but there are a lot. You can see a little bit of the memorial behind the trees in the middle!

After we walked through Chiang Kai-shek, we went to the National History Museum! I loved it! There was art and photography and artifacts etc. I didn't get any pictures there, but I loved it!

This frog phone was behind the National History Museum in the Botanical Gardens! Isn't this phone awesome?!

This is part of the botanical gardens! We stood under this pavilion for awhile while we waited out a downpour! The red building you see is the museum!

See all of those lily pads... or at least I think that's what they are since they were growing in the water. There sure were a lot of them. This pond was beautiful!

I love these trees!

I have no idea what kind of bird this is, but I liked it.

At the botanical gardens!

After we finished at the botanical gardens we headed to the center of Taipei and went to Macaroni Grill for dinner. It was super good, a little pricey, but delicious! I have leftovers that I will eat tomorrow night for dinner.

Yesterday was a lovely day! I enjoyed myself and I am grateful that I could go temple and that I could learn more about the history of Taiwan!