Tourist Dude

(Also, China landed a rover on the moon!)

Hey guys! I meant to update the blog yesterday, but for whatever reason I was having problems uploading pictures. It's fixed now, though!

My parents have asked me to take more pictures of day-to-day things, which results in me looking like a tourist. A really easily impressed tourist, at that. But, you know, whatever- I'm obviously not native anyway. Smile!

This is my favorite coffee shop:

They're studiously ignoring me- it took like three tries to get this picture right

It's called Cama Coffee, and it's pretty legit. They make coffee using vacuum siphons, they have their own roasting machine in-house, and you can ask for a certain kind of bean to be put in your coffee! (But you need to ask in Chinese. So I pretty much got whatever they felt like giving me. Still good though.) It's a bit of a walk away from my apartment, on the other side of Da'an Park, but sometimes it's worth it.

School is good. We had another test, and I got a 90 on it. I'm actually surprised I did so well, I was really nervous about the grammar we'd been learning in that unit. Actually, although I am learning a huge amount compared to back home, and although I am doing pretty well in class, I recently had a bit of a reality check. This last Friday, we all did a project where we wrote a short article comparing one thing to another- not a complex concept, but a good grammar exercise. After we wrote it, we traded with a classmate and attempted to fix their errors. She did pretty well, only one major error (although granted, she is Japanese). I... didn't do quite so well. Actually, my paper was full of errors, none so bad that you couldn't understand my meaning, but still not right. And it goes without saying that my Chinese characters are chicken scratch compared to hers (again, Japanese). So although I may be doing fairly well, I need to stay on top of it, because I've got a long way to go.

Despite my busy schedule with school, I managed to go out in midweek service several times. Here's a shot of us all meeting up:

We don't usually have a formal meeting for field service on weekdays, but we still take a couple minutes to arrange things.

That was Wednesday, and actually that day was amazing. In four hours of field service, I managed to place 36 magazines and 30 tracts, along with many invitations! Mason placed a similar amount. It's amazing how many people are interested in learning about the Bible here compared with back home. Even if half of them are only taking the literature to be polite- even if 3/4ths, or even 9 out of 10- that's still five or six truly interested people in four hours, and that isn't bad.

After a few hours, I had to leave to go to school, and walking through Da'an Park I saw these guys:

Chinese ducks! Delicious!

Unfortunately I couldn't get closer, the "Ecological Pond" is marked off so you can't get too close to it.

After school, I joined up with the evening service group!

We all met at Dongmen Station. If it's translated, it means "East Gate", which is nowhere near as funny.

Service in this area at night was... interesting. As soon as we got away from the main street, we ended up in a warren of narrow alleys, roofed over with sheet metal, filled with cheap restaurants and small shops. Most of them were closed this time of night. I tried to take a picture, but one of the brothers told me it probably wasn't a good idea to bring my camera out there! The air smelled heavy, filled with the smell of many kinds of food and refuse, and the voices of people echoed loudly in the narrow spaces. The ground was not paved for vehicles, but cobbled and looking quite old. 

The alleys extended for a really long way, and I'm glad that I was with local friends or I might have gotten totally lost, but there were people in them and most of them were happy to talk to us briefly. Our current magazine is about lies people tell about God, and as most people here have only a passing familiarity with Christianity they're quite interested in the subject. They know that most churches disagree, but they don't know why, so they're glad to read up on what the Bible actually says.

Eventually, we escaped the aboveground tunnels and resumed regular door-to-door work.

This is us just about finished for the night. The brother on the right (Kent Huang, one of the missionaries) is double-checking our lists against what we've done, just in case.

On the way home, I remembered my parents wanted me to grab a picture of a bus I take or something, which is really difficult. In Taiwan, buses do not wait for you. You have five seconds to board, if that- I've actually seen people board and leave a bus before it's stopped, which means it gets to keep on driving, never actually stopping. The MRT is similar, sort of- it has a predetermined small amount of time to wait, usually ten seconds or so, but most times people will shove you out of the way if you don't board immediately. Next time I'm there and it;s not busy, I'll try to get a picture. But all of this is to say- this is not my bus:

Hello, random bus!

-but just a random bus I saw pulling up in time for me to get a shot. They're all identical anyway.

One last stop before I make it home: my local market, Matsusei. It's apparently a Japanese chain of stores that have expanded into Taiwan, which makes all our Japanese friends happy. The inside looks like this:

Hi everyone! I swear I'm not a spy taking random pictures!

Pretty much a regular grocery store, except everything is in Chinese. You can get some pretty good stuff in there, actually- their alcohol selection isn't bad, they sell six-liter jugs of water for NT$40 each, and they even have an ethnic section with stuff like ketchup and black olives!

So yesterday, Mason and I went out in service early, meeting up with the group in the Park at 8am. We'd made the plans a couple days in advance, so we definitely were going to make it!

Sadly, it was raining Saturday. It still is, actually. That didn't stop us from going out, but it did make Mason very sad he didn't have an umbrella.

It was the sound of ultimate suffering.

He also discovered that his bag isn't waterproof, so all his stuff inside got completely soaked. We had a decent time, but after not too long we were soaked, me from the knees down, him from the... everything down. My shoes are actually still drying out! So we got some coffee and went home for a while.

After not too long, though, I got bored. So I had an idea! Let's go to the National Palace Museum!

For those that don't know, the National Palace Museum is awesome. Back in the 1940s, when Mao Zedong and the Communist Party came into power in China, the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-Shek was fighting a losing battle and knew it. So when they evacuated the Forbidden City in Beijing, they basically looted it and took all their art, all their jades, all their gold, all their valuables, and shipped them to Taiwan. All that wealth not only allowed them to turn Taiwan from a backwater island to an arguably first-world country in just about fifty years, it also gave them to basis for an awesome Chinese museum, with more ancient Chinese artifacts than even Mainland China has. (They used to be really angry about that, but they're getting over it.)

After taking the subway a long way north to Shilin, then a bus even farther out, Mason and I approach the gates: 

Although it had been raining all day, it was still about 75 degrees out. Ah, tropical islands...

They're done in old style, but only about forty years old. China has all the big old stuff, Taiwan has all the small old stuff. And the gold.

The main walkway, with one of the guardian lions outside.

Closeup of the lion. They say that they're not trying to reflect the actual outside of the lion, but what the lion thinks it looks like. These lions always come in twos, one male standing on a globe, one female protecting a cub.

Chiang Kai-Shek himself, sitting in audience. He's a national hero here.

Sadly, there were no pictures allowed in the museum itself, so I have nothing else to show you.

Okay, so I took some pictures anyway. But they're not as good as I would have liked, since I had to take them quickly with my cameraphone when the (very vigilant!) security wasn't looking.

A stunningly beautiful carved jade screen, showing a forest scene. The details on the carving were incredible.

An inscribed lapis lazuli stone, once marking the western border of Qing Dynasty China along a road.

A calendar jade, dating to about 1000 BC. The stand is new, obviously, but it't the same style. Its rim has very worn markings along the rim- the thought is that some monk or other would turn it one mark every day, and thus keep a unified calendar throughout Zhou China.

I believe this is an imperial decree from the Qing Dynasty, carved in jade plates and bearing the imperial dragon on the front. I asked a sister to translate this for me, since the characters are fairly modern, but she was too terrified of the dragon!

That's just a very few samples of all the beautiful artifacts they have. I've heard that they can only display 2 or 3% of all their things at once, so if I come back next month it will be totally different!

And then they had this:

Taiwanese mech! Run away!

They had an area where they took one of the more famous Qing emperors, Emperor Qianlong, took all his portraits and writings, and created a computer representation of what they believe he would actually look like. Then they put him in an interactive comic that takes your picture and puts your face in it. Then they made a model of him and put him in a large mech with furry hands and feet, with more hands for shoulders... naturally enough.

On the way home, we went through Shilin Night Market, one of the more famous ones, and one that (by size at least) blows our little Shida Market out of the water. But not only were they big, they had a ukulele store!

If it was ultimate suffering before, that's the smile of ultimate contentment.

Mason didn't have enough cash on him, so he couldn't get anything, but we may very well go back. The workers seemed happy just to listen to Mason play- he's pretty good!

And we capped the night off with some of the best xiaolongbao I've had here.

The line was so long they had us wait behind the counter, so I got this picture of them making it.

So that's been my week! I've been very busy, but it's a good busy. I will say that school is taking more of my time than I was expecting it to, when you account for travel time and especially homework, but it's valuable stuff I'm learning that will pay off in the long run. I'm grateful I'm still in good health- Harry was sick for the first two or three weeks here, Mason says he might be slowing down a bit, some other newly arrived people are getting sick- I guess I shouldn't jinx it, but I'm happy it seems to have missed me.

If anyone has anything they'd like me to take a picture of in particular, please let me know! Until next time!