Kaohsiung, Land of the Beautiful Temples & Sunsets!

This past weekend, Liz, Kailey, Karyn and I decided to make a bigger trip, where we actually spend the whole weekend somewhere. Kaohsiung was our destination.

On Friday night, we sped to the train station on our bikes right after work. We got there with about 15 minutes to spare, where we attempted to go through the ticket line but the machine wouldn't take our tickets. We had no idea why, then it was pointed out to us that the tickets were for the wrong day!

What do we do now? Well we found some really nice people who spoke English and helped us get the situation figured out! We ended up buying new tickets and then getting a partial refund once we got to Kaohsiung. (Even though we bought the tickets at the last minute, we were able to get seats, for which I am grateful! They have tickets for standing room too.)

We arrived in Kaohsiung on Friday night and my friend, Tricia (who I wrote about before) was waiting for us at the train station. She helped us in our quest of getting a refund for our tickets. Then she drove us to our hostel in downtown Kaohsiung. The hostel was really clean and lovely and it was pretty dang cheap! We shared a room with one other girl, who was really friendly!

We woke up bright and early on Saturday morning and Tricia drove us to Foguangshan. Foguangshan is a huge Buddhist complex on a hill about 20 minutes outside of Kaohsiung.

This is the main attraction of Foguangshan! I believe it's the tallest Buddha statue in all of Taiwan! It's 36 meters (118 feet) high! (There are 480 smaller images of the Buddha surrounding the large one.)

Here's some more of the Buddhas surrounding the large one!

Me in front of the statue!

Up close and personal with the statues!

Me in front of the statue again! I just can't get enough pictures :)

Look at that pagoda! This is in the temple complex! It is beautiful!

I loved these little statues! They were everywhere!

I liked this one with no legs! All of these statues were small!

This is the biggest temple on the complex and IT IS HUGE! Seriously!

This is looking inside of the temple! Those Buddhas are also very big!

Inside of the temple! Look how small that person looks at the left of the picture!

All of the walls look like this up close! Literally from about a foot above the floor to the windows up above and from corner to corner, the walls had these statues in the holes!

Some more statues, but these were in a different part of the complex! These all have different poses and faces as opposed to the ones by the tall Buddha statue that all looked the same.

I loved these red gates! I have so many more pictures at Foguangshan, but alas I cannot post them all.

The complex has so much more than what I have pictured! It has a university and museums and more temples and pagodas and statues and souvenir shops and dorms... It is huge!

After Foguangshan, we made our way to the beach. We drove back to Kaohsiung! We took a ferry to get to the beach!

This is a view of the city from the ferry!

Me on the ferry!

Tricia and I at the beach! Liz, Karyn, Kailey and I changed into our swimsuits. Tricia didn't because she had to go somewhere else fairly soon, but she stayed and walked along the beach with us for awhile.

P.S. This was the first time my roommates and I had seen the ocean since we've been on this wonderful island of Taiwan! We've been here exactly two months today!

As we were at the beach we got to witness one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen! I love sunsets! Each one is so different and so marvelous!

Another part of the sunset!

Look at the color of the clouds and the water! I love the light reflecting off of the water!

It was a wonderful time at the beach! The water was warm and shallow, the sun was behind the clouds, the waves were just the right size. I love relaxing at the beach!

After the beach we went back to the place to get on the ferry and the line was super duper long. I think we only waited about an hour or so ;) I know this picture is dark, but this is Kailey, Karyn, and Liz waiting for the ferry.

We ended up going to the night market in Kaohsiung, near our hostel, after the beach on Saturday. That place was huge!

Overall the day was marvelous! I love exploring and seeing new places! One can learn so much by exploring and studying and asking questions.

This is Day 1 of our Kaohsiung trip! More to come soon... :)

Changhua Rocks!

Yesterday was a really good day! We stayed here in our lovely city of Changhua! In the morning, we went to the morning market. We bought the ingredients we needed to make dumplings for that night and we just looked around and took it all in!
They had some pretty interesting things there, like live snakes and frogs and fish in bowls on the ground ready for someone to buy and take home to eat, whole dead plucked chickens (some were white and some were black.) They had a little bit of everything.

Later in the day we went to this awesome Confucius temple in downtown Changhua! It's beautiful! I believe it was built in the 1700s. It's been renovated a little bit, but it is old.

Look at that bell! It didn't actually have a ringer in it, but I liked it! It is heavy; if that would have fallen on top of me, it would've hurt ;)

Some details of the temple! I really love how colorful the temples are here!

Look at this shot! It took quite a few times for me to get all of us in the shot. All of us took turns taking the picture and each time we would switch spots in the background :) It was great fun!

Look at these doors! They are old and beautiful!

Me in front of the temple!

Educational notes in the temple! They have these cards that you can write on and write your educational hopes on them and then hang them up. For example someone wrote that they hope that all of their English students will learn English well! You can write whatever you want that has to do with education. I didn't write one. Maybe next time.

I loved this shot with the tree and the temple in the background! The trees here are so beautiful!

After we toured the temple, we headed to the grocery store for a few more ingredients for our dinner and then we went home and rested. Then we made our meal of dumplings and egg drop soup. The dumplings were a success! But the egg drop soup not so much ;) But it was a good time!

Later that night we had a little dance party with loud music and glow sticks! It was so much fun to let off some energy and just dance and not care that I do not know how to dance at all. Afterward we decided to calm down by watching a movie. The movie was hilarious!

Yesterday was a good day! Friday was a good day! Today was a good day!

Happy Friday the 13th!

Today was a good day! Classes went pretty smoothly! It had its moments, but overall it was a happy day for me!

After school today, Karyn, Liz, Kailey, Amy and I went to Costco! It's about a 20-minute train ride and then a 30-minute walk. How can I describe the awesomeness that was Costco?! I do not know. It's seriously just like a Costco in America. The only difference is there's a bunch of Taiwanese people and a few crazy foreigners :)

It was a madhouse! When I say madhouse, I mean insanely busy, like I've never seen a Costco in America that busy and that's saying a lot (having been in Costcos in Utah and Virginia)

After the shopping trip in which I bought trailmix (yay!), shampoo, and real sharp cheddar cheese (yay again!), we ate at Costco, where I had a really good bacon cheeseburger and soda!

I'm in Taiwan! Sometimes, I just sit here and think I'm in Taiwan! What's up with that?! How cool is that?! I can't believe it! It's crazy awesome! Happy Friday the 13th!

I'm in Love!

With Taiwan!
I love this plant!

What an adventurous day! This morning Karyn, Kailey and I biked to the train station and waited for the train to Ershui (Land of the Monkeys). Last time we were in Ershui, we got a brochure for a city called Jhushan. It looked awesome and so we decided to try and go there today!

We didn't exactly know how to get there besides that we needed to get a bus in Ershui. We had no idea how many times a day the bus ran or if it even ran at all on Saturdays. We couldn't find any information about it online. Thankfully the man at the visitor center in Ershui spoke some English and was able to help us!

The next bus didn't come for another 1-1/2 hours, so we decided to wander around Ershui a bit. The first two pictures of this post are in Ershui!


I loved the red pavilion and the yellow sunflower and the brown tree stump with the green plant growing out of it all together!

We finally got on the bus and the bus ride alone was worth it! This is from the bus! Look how green and tall and straight the mountain is! I didn't take many pictures from the bus but the views were amazing!

We made it to Jhushan! This statue was near the visitor center there! It's made of bamboo and I just thought it was funny!

It took us awhile to make it to the visitor center, because once we got to Jhushan we realized how bad our map was and that no one spoke English. Thankfully, though, the map we had had the names of the places we wanted to go in English and Chinese. After asking four people by pointing at the map and body language, we found our way to the visitor center :) The people were super nice!

When we got to the visitor center the ladies there did not speak any English either, but once again, thanks to the map and body language and the super nice people, we knew where we needed to go :)

We found this beautiful Daoist Temple on the way to our destination! It's beautiful, new, huge and detailed!

The temple! I don't know what it's called, but we all really loved it!

Look at all of that relief carving on the wall and pillar!

The yin and yang symbol!

I loved the detail! Look how intricately carved this pillar is!

Money burning! They symbolically burn money! I can't remember why they do it, but it's fascinating to watch. (It's not real money, just in case you were wondering :)

This is the tower that they burn the money in!

Look at that detail!

We ended up walking a ton today! We didn't realize how far apart things were there! But we got to see a lot of awesome things on our journey!
I really wanted to see one of these tea fields while we were in Jhushan and we definitely got to see one! I love this one on the hill!

I just wanted to put the picture of this butterfly up!

Another tea field! It's huge! It's funny because we couldn't see the end, meaning it looks like there's a drop-off or something at the end, but we don't know! I loved this field! I don't know why, but it just mesmerized me!

A small cemetery on a hill!

Look how gorgeous this is! I loved it!

A lady fishing in the river with her hat and goulashes on!

And we made it to our destination! This was the main reason we came to Jhushan and everything else was just an added bonus! It's a suspension bridge! A real, live suspension bridge that shakes when you walk on it!

Karyn, Kailey and I on the suspension bridge! It wasn't scary or anything. But it's just awesome to go on a suspension bridge in the jungle of Taiwan! I really felt like we were in the jungle on certain parts of our walk today :)

Contemplating the meaning of life on the bridge ;)

Color accent on the bridge!

After the wonderful suspension bridge we went briefly to some botanical gardens! It was breathtakingly beautiful! This picture is in the gardens!

See that white ball in between the dragons?! I know you do, well that is the sun! The sun looked really cool today! It didn't really look real to me. It just looked like a white ball in the sky.

Jhushan was amazing! We are already planning on going back! There are some more suspension bridges and waterfalls and museums and parks that we haven't seen. The funny thing about Jhushan is that it is not in any of the tourist books of Taiwan, but it has so many things to see and do! It's kind of nice that it's not so touristy! I really am in love!