Always an Adventure...

Wow! I'm so tired! But I know I need to update! I'll tell about our trip to Hualien in a later post, it was quite wonderful! Anyways, as some of you may know, I celebrated my 23rd birthday today! I can honestly say it was one of the best birthdays I've had for at least a couple of years! Last year I was in Brazil, which was cool but it was our second day of travelling so we were more tired than anything else. This is my second birthday in a foreign country! I woke up this morning and talked to my mom. Then I went for breakfast and went to get my hair done... I got something akin to "princess" hair done ( sheng re de tou fa maybe) complete with a string of fake pearls in it! I prepared for my classes which were ok (well except for the one that was cancelled lol... we got to Yuli Jr. High and found out our first class was cancelled and so we went for coffee with our co-teachers... and i got my birthday Macchiato hehe). We invited some of our friends to come to our ...

Here you go... THE birthday picture! 23 seems so much older than 22, maybe because you can reverse the numbers to be 32 instead of just 22 again.... heh.  

My princess hair! 

 

Hope making the cake!  

My little pile of gifts, all sitting on top of the lovely shawl from Peggy (it's black and sparkly). Including a puzzle from Hope (we'd talked about doing one since we arrived), cards, slippers from Michelle and Jen, my box from Tammy (with one pack of TIM HORTON'S coffee out) and some other gifts that I'll give you closer look at. 

My cake at the Su's house.  

This was made for me by Esther. It is a chop - a special stamp often bearing your name, the characters on this mean "Always Joyful" 

A closeup of the beautiful hair clip I got from Amy Jieh.  

These are from Dan. A pair of chopsticks (decorative ones) and a traditional cooking tool that has the pattern of a turtle and the character for long life. 

well first of all, I should say that singing went pretty well! It was fun... I really enjoyed having Pastor Zhang (possibly THE most energetic man in Taiwan) in the front row clapping, and beaming his little smile... i need some students like him! But actually it was encouraging to look out at the congregation and see so many familiar faces. Many of the people even participated when we sang in English! Anyways, I had a whim to make Lasagna tonight which I did with not too many difficulties... we haven't been able to find cottage cheese here, or ground beef for that matter (not normally my favorite thing, but it's quite useful in some dishes) so I made a chicken, spinach, and mushroom lasagna. The only problem was that I ran out of sauce at the end, so the top noodles didn't cook as well, and ended up a little crispy. We ate our lasagna with Shirley while watching Anne of Green Gables. Good fun! Tomorrow we're going to Hualien for fun but unlike other days, we are stay...

It's 11:45pm.... contrary to days of old, I want to go to bed soon but I'm waiting for my room to cool off a bit from a balmy 31 degrees.... the temperatures these days are like the end of June in Canada. There was a mosquito in my room last night and I have a ton of bites now... I actually woke up at one point as I felt it biting me.. odd hey? Tomorrow morning we're singing in church, two songs that are familiar and two that really aren't... we'll see how it goes... I think i'll be turning my microphone off for the one...it's really really fast... anyways, here's a line from one song that we're singing in chinese and english (possibly just Hope and I singing the english at first...since that seems to be their general idea of how things should work, regardless of the fact that we're singing Mandarin songs with them, therefore it makes complete sense that they sing the English song with us!). That was a really long aside... Wo zhi dao wo de jio sh...

a little corner of tranquility at Yon Feng Guo Xiao 

a new week has already begun, and i have yet to share much about last week... it was kind of a rushed week, especially on account of our trip. Sunday was my actual 6 month anniversary in Taiwan... unbelievable! Sunday morning we got to go to Grace church (which is different in many ways from Yuli church) and that was really great! We visited that church once in January, the week before the pastor and his wife were leaving to study in Canada for 3 months. Ever since then we have been eagerly anticipating their return! On Saturday afternoon we were invited to one of our students' farms to pick mulberries. That was interesting.... they grow a number of interesting things, including grapes (to make wine), betel nut (eeeewwwww), and bamboo. Our hostess served us fresh papaya and red wine. I thought the wine was quite good but Hope couldn't drink it, so she cleverly distracted our hostess and then switched our cups... I had to struggle to keep a straight face... but anyways, by ...

...just thought you should know.

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Saturday morning We taught English Club before heading off to Taipei. We were teaching emotions, and it was actually a lot of fun. One of the activities was acting out sentences using various emotions. The one we did as an example was "Is this your dog?" Hope played the dog, and bit me, got run over by my car, chased aroudn the room, and of course patted on the head. But then we got to the emotion "hungry" and both of us just cracked up at the though of hungrily asking a potential owner "is this your dog? (or can i eat it)" Taipei We had a long train ride and then a taxi ride to Amy's house. The cab driver on the way was a little odd. He asked us if we had babies. When we said no, he was like "why not??" and we were like uhhhh we're not married. His advice was to find a nice man in Hualien and have some babies... oh dear.. We went to Page One, an amazing bookstore in Taipei 101, and I bought Desiring God by John Piper and A Love Worth Gi...

Whew, we just returned from our little vacation in Taidong! It was nice to get away from Yuli for a bit, and hang out with Faith and her roommate Rebecca! It was cool to be able to speak English and spend time with people of both shared faith and experiences. The pictures below actually tell about most of the fun. Hope and I decided that from now on, we have to take pictures any time we see an aboriginal statue. Lets see, what did we do? Went shopping a bit, visited the ocean, got our hair washed, got sticky pics taken, watched a movie, walked around downtown Taidong, Ate pizza, pasta, nachos, and mcdonalds (sounds like a healthy trip eh?). Oooh yeah and Faith and I got to commiserate about Tim Horton's though she had some that she made for us mmmmmmm. well i used up all my creativity in posting the pictures below, so go look and leave me some comments people!

 

We made some new friends in Taidong 

....however, some were not so friendly.... 

I swear, I only have 500 NT! 

gleaning wisdom from the ancients 

When in Rome... 

or Taiwan.... 

Hope got into a really deep discussion with some of the locals. 

We rode around Taidong on the back of a scooter and a motorcycle respectively... now THAT was interesting