Visit 探訪

(A guest arrives!)

This week, most of our activity has been dominated by one person, a slight girl known to some as... Kayla Moore. Mason's sister came to Taiwan to visit her brother! And she picked a good time to do it, too- today, actually is Chinese New Year, so for the last few days and for the next few days everyone is on vacation! Hooray, school's out! So we've had lots of time to do touristy things with her and help her get a feel for Taiwan and Chinese. Mason's not-so-secret motive for all of this is to get her to join Chinese, and hopefully someday move to Taiwan...

We started the week by doing early service in Daan Park.

Anyone for some morning Tai-Chi? And yes, I asked before I took this picture.

Daan Park is always pleasant, and it's very nice spending the first couple hours of a day walking around with a friend or two talking to people about creation. Unfortunately, Kayla can't speak a word of Chinese, so she was a bit confused walking around with Mason all morning, but it was still a nice morning.

Afterwards, we went into the National Taiwan University's campus:

The resemblance is uncanny!

Normally we aren't allowed onto the campus to preach, but because school is out no one cared. We actually ran into someone quite interesting- while walking around the campus, we saw a bagel shop. That's unusual, because I haven't seen a bagel since arriving in Taiwan, so naturally we went to buy some bagels and coffee. The shop is owned by a sister! She's a Taiwanese sister who moved to Alameda, CA about twenty years ago, but when her mother became sick three years ago had to move back to Taiwan. She wanted to not have to get a regular 9-to-5 job, so she thought: Bagels are delicious. Americans like to eat bagels. Taipei has no bagels, but has Americans. So she opened a bagel shop, and is doing well! She gave us free coffee and bagels for visiting her, and I now have a favorite spot to do homework if, for whatever reason, I can't do it at home.

The next day, we decided to ascend to the top of Taipei 101. I've seen it many times since arriving- you can see it from almost anywhere in the city- and I've been inside it a few times, but I had never actually gone to the top. It was a bit expensive, but check out these views:

Looking East, towards the mountains

Kayla is overcome!... or something

Looking West, towards most of the City

Mason and Kayla in a window

Panorama from the 91st floor after sunset, West and North

So Taipei 101 is huge, obviously, and Taipei City is in not only an area prone to typhoons, but is also in an active fault zone, so often has earthquakes. Those two factors are why most of Taipei is shorter than 20 stories tall. In order to keep the skyscraper safe, comfortable, and vertical, it has inside of it a huge motion damper, 600 tons of steel mounted on massive hydraulics and hanging from the roof, designed to absorb the wobbling of the building. Being Taiwanese, naturally they anthropomorphized it!

Hanging out with the Damper, and the Damper Baby

According to the stats inside the damper room, it reduces the wobbling by 40%. They have a video of it working during a typhoon, and it looks like it was a really good idea to have! At the top of the tower, they also had a small display of art, such as this eagle:

Cool, right? Every single feather is carved out of a different piece of coral, then fitted together

And now for something completely different...

This last weekend, we were invited by our congregation's hosted group, the Daan Group, to go on a picnic with them. We actually drove cars to a place about 90 minutes outside of Taipei, near a town called Pingxi. There were about 20 people invited, and it was a really refreshing change from being inside the city so much.

We're not in Taipei anymore...

All the people, all the friends. :-)

It was a cool setup- we each paid the equivalent of $10, and not only got to rent an area to hang out and cook but also were provided with a bunch of meat, vegetables, fruit, beer, rice, soda, everything needed to have a nice time. They also had a karaoke machine, but we didn't have enough Japanese friends with us to use it.

Brother Qi, his two sons and Ryota cooking with gas!... actually, with coal.

After we ate a lot, we played with the kids, playing a game similar to dodgeball that I'm pretty sure we just made up, and later hide-and-seek, which they are much better at than I am. (How can those tiny legs run so fast?!)

Group shot!

 On another day, we also decided to go through the Zoo up to Maokong, that same place I went with Harry a few weeks ago.

Random penguins!

In order to get to Maokong, you need to either hike or take the gondola... so we took the gondola, because it's like five miles away.

Also, because gondolas are awesome.

Even if Kayla was a little freaked out by it...

Because we're masochistic, mostly what we talked about was the worst places to fall off the cable. We decided "five feet from Maokong Station" was the worst, if only for the irony.

So last time I was in Maokong, I showed pictures of Taipei from up there; here's some pictures of Maokong itself! We took a bit of a hike around, and here's what we saw:

Rice terraces...

Scary looking rope bridges...

And tea plantations!

Ah yes, one last thing: While we were near Pingxi, we decided to go into the town itself. Pingxi is the site of the Paper Lantern Festival, which happens once every year a few weeks after Chinese New Year. The idea is you write your wishes for the next year onto the lantern, then release it into the sky. It's not for a little while yet, but there were still a few people launching their lanterns and wishes:

Unfortunately, it has a lot to do with Taoism, so we're not going to do it ourselves (the same reason we don't hand out red envelopes or do the Dragon Dance). It's still a cool thing to see. Also, the lanterns are big; I had imagined hand lantern-sized lanterns, but you could easily fit into these things! 

We still have about five days of vacation left. I return to school on the 5th of February, and Kayla takes off for home on the morning of the 4th, so we can still do some fun stuff. We're inviting a bunch of people over to our house on Sunday night, so that will be fun!

I'll tell you how it went next time...