Departed 離開了

 (No, not me, the other guy...)

Yes, the time has arrived. Mason departed Taiwan bound for Omaha, NE this last Monday at 5pm, and because time zones are crazy spent near twenty hours in the air to land on the same Monday at midnight. Before he left, we had a nice party for him- well, actually, it was his idea so I guess he had a nice party for himself, but a bunch of people came over anyway.

Hi again guys!

We had a crazy amount of people in our house; over twenty people came in all, and almost everyone brought something to share. As of the time of writing, we still have leftovers from this get-together in our fridge! Mason once again prepared a few rounds of Mafia for us to play, and it really was a great time.

Also, weird pizza! This is crab, pineapple, ham and pea pizza.

 Having that many people over also reminded us about our weird living situation. Now, I'd like to say first that I don't mind any of these things, or I would have done something about it; but still, we don't have silverware, only chopsticks (except for the one fork we bought for Kayla to use); we have one pan for frying things, and one pot for boiling things, but the pot is too small to fit on our burners so has to be held in place; we don't have any kind of table whatsoever, just desks, nor do we have any chairs (the ones in the picture were borrowed from the Kingdom Hall), etc.

The weirdness did not stop Mason from
demolishing that pizza.

I mention this because one of the brothers, Giancarlo, promised us that he would make delicious Italian food when he came over, but then had to cancel. He felt bad about it, though, so he prepared the sauce and sent our Korean friend Hanji over with it- the plan was we'd make the noodles here and just combine the two.
As it turns out, that simple task became a quest of epic proportions. First, the noodles- I couldn't find Italian pasta at the store, so I bought Chinese noodles (sorry Giancarlo!). Then we discovered that our ramen-sized pot was not big enough to hold the food; happily, at this early point Sr. Fu noticed us having trouble with this simple task and stepped in to help, pulling an enormous pot out of nowhere (seriously- where did she get that from?! Mason, if you read this, do you remember?) and and taking control of our kitchen. Of course, once we'd started the noodles boiling we realized we didn't have tongs long enough to reach them without dipping our hands in boiling water.

Thank you, Auntie Fu!  謝謝福伯母！

At that point, Terry arrived carrying a long pair of tongs! This was working out great so far, but now we realized we can't strain the water out- so out came the pan to mix in the sauce. Then we didn't have anyplace to put the food, so we dragged another desk out, and at long last everyone could sit on borrowed chairs or blankets on the ground and eat their Chinese-Italian pasta while a behatted Mason walked around accusing people of being Mafia.

After a few hours, we all decided to head out to the field and play some soccer, which as usual was pretty awesome. We had so many people there we actually had both a soccer game and a baseball game going- people kept wandering in and out of them, so the score didn't really matter (or at least, so I tell myself- we lost), and eventually after a couple of hours it all just degenerated into us talking and laughing. Not a bad thing!

This is about half the group- many people had already trickled away

It was all made more poignant, of course, by the knowledge everyone had that this was Mason's last evening in Taiwan, for a while at least.

The sisters here often show their affection by kicking

We got back to the house extremely late and crashed.

The next day... woke up late, Mason packed his bags, we three (Mason, Harry and I) went out to eat at a great Japanese sushi place... actually, we ate for a bit too long, so we left, had to hail a cab to get to the airport on time. Mason arrived, we got him all squared away with his tickets and baggage and everything, and then at customs... 

See you later man!

We'll miss him, but he'll be back.

But, you know, life goes on, and I still had some interesting things happen after Mason left.

So one day out in service...

I had the chance to work with one of our elders from Korea recently, Br. Yuan, and what he's really been recommending is using our movies out in the ministry. His comprehension of Chinese is quite good, but he has a very thick accent and sometimes has trouble getting his message across to whoever he's speaking to. To get around that, he's started using a video from our website, called "Why Study the Bible?" It's only three minutes long and it's available in a huge variety of languages. Just download it to your smartphone or tablet, start talking with someone, and if they show interest let them look at it. It's seriously a really good video, I've been baptized for seven years now and after watching it I wanted to study the Bible.

The really great thing about it is the languages, I think. Even if you're preaching in your native tongue, everyone runs across foreigners occasionally. Why not have this video on your phone in a few different languages? It's less than 50MB in size, so it'll definitely fit, and who knows what it might start?

Pulling a late night with Br & Sr. Liang

And that brings us to earlier today. Today is a holiday! Hooray! I'm honestly not sure why today is a holiday, but I'm not complaining! So we did what we usually do, get a bunch of people together and go to the bowling/arcade place! 

I'm not sure what those sisters are doing back there!

I'm still really bad at bowling, decent at pool, and good at videogames, even if they're all in Japanese. It's good to know some things just never change :-) It was a lot of fun, and you might notice something interesting about the next picture:

Besides how many sisters there are, that is.

I'm the only Westerner there! That means that I couldn't speak English to absolutely anyone the entire morning- that's the first time that's happened, and you know, it wasn't bad! Sure, I didn't understand every word people said, particularly if they started talking between themselves, but we still joked around and had a blast! 

Aika hiding from the sun

The sun is definitely stronger here in Taiwan than it was back home. We've had so many cloudy days, it's easy to not notice it; but on a beautiful clear day like today, walking into the sunlight is like walking close to a campfire. In many ways, it really is the same; except the Sun is eight light-minutes away, not 30 feet, and is also roughly a billion times bigger than a campfire. It's interesting; back in America, everyone (especially girls) wants to get tan, but in Taiwan everyone tries really hard to stay as pale as possible, so you'll see things like people wearing long sleeves and carrying an umbrella in the scorching heat.

Also, we were in front of a restaurant, and it was delicious. They make their own hot sauce, which is hot enough to make your tongue numb!

Delicious! But don't drink the rest of the broth, unless you don't mind risking an emergency trip to the bathroom!

Tomorrow, our new roommate arrive will be arriving. I still haven't even had one conversation with him, but through Terry I hear that he is British, 19 years old, can't speak a word of Chinese, has no interest in learning (he'll attend the English), and only plans to be here for three months. We'll have to see how this all works out!

Culture 文化

(It's more than clothes!)

Taiwan is an interesting place.

I don't just mean there are cool people here and many interesting things to do- you probably could have guessed that by reading the other posts in this blog. It's interesting because in many ways, it feels very familiar. There are things that are the same the entire world- eat food, drink water, find someplace to sleep, make friends. How you actually do those things and what language you speak change, but at their core they are the same.

But in some ways, it is a very different place, and traditional customs are one of those places. No place's customs are entirely good or bad, of course. One custom is they are, traditionally, very respectful. For instance, if your friend invites you to a restaurant, no one leaves until he stands up, and no one starts eating until he starts, because he invited you. He doesn't have to pick up the bill, but if it was his idea he's the "host". 

Another example that my teacher told me about, if you're younger than, say, 25, your parents can forbid you from being friends with someone... and typically, you actually stop being their friend. If that seems a bit odd to you, don't worry, it did to me as well... but then, we Americans really love our freedoms. The Taiwanese are surprised that we'd be willing to risk our lifelong relationship with our parents to take a gamble on a friend, and to highlight how independent we are. I don't necessarily agree with either country's customs or the stereotype of them, it's just interesting to think about.

This week in service has been really good.  I've had the opportunity to work with Br. Liang (梁弟兄, the one in the blue) a few times- he's a special pioneer assigned to the area- and it has been really good for my ministry. His manner of speaking to people is really good, and he's been helping me pick better words to say to people, to be more polite in my phrasing. This is one area where my university doesn't help so much yet- most of the words we learn there are very useful but direct at this stage, all information and no subtlety. Hopefully I get to work more with him in the future!

This week as far as activities go, the biggest one is finally, after three months of living here, I went to see the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. I've walked past it many times, it has a subway stop inside it, I've talked about it, but it took me this long to actually go there.

Main gate, facing Roosevelt Street

Chiang Kai-Shek was the President of the Republic of China from the 1930's to the 1960's. He started his career by unifying the various squabbling warlords in China back in the late 20's, fought the Japanese and Communist Chinese for a few decades until he was forced to retreat to Taiwan, and with America's help started modernizing the country. He did some good things, he did some bad things, but the Taiwanese people revere him and built him a really nice mausoleum in the center of their capitol city.

That thing is really nice!

That photo was taken standing in the middle of the plaza, with the main building right in front. Behind and to the left, there is this building:

...which is the National Theater House. There wasn't anything playing there at the time, but Joseph says he went to see a Beijing Opera there a few months ago, which is pretty cool! On the other side...

Similar but different!

That's the Nat'l Concert Hall. They had some pop band or other playing at the time, no one I had heard before. Speaking of, if anyone is interested, this song is really popular in Taiwan right now. :-)

Walking up the stairs to the main building, you get to see inside the mausoleum:

It's quite formal inside, with color guards and everything wearing mirrored helmets. Here's the man himself:

I gotta say, I like that his statue is smiling.

But by far, the best part was downstairs, in the gift shop:

Memorial liquor: The true patriot's choice!

Actually, they had a lot of stuff downstairs. They had quite an extensive art collection, mostly done by just one guy, Zhang Qiyun, who also happens to be the founder of my university. So that was pretty cool! Sadly I couldn't take pictures of any of the artworks, but here's me next to some of his calligraphy:

That character is "Long 龍". It means Dragon, so he tried to make it look like a dragon!

Later in the week, I went out in service with Xie again, in Daan Park. The weather has been quite weird here- we had a solid week of 70 degrees and sunny in January, which everyone said was odd, and now it's been cold until just a couple days ago, which is later than it should have been. But that day had the perfect weather.

Beautiful!

Less beautiful, but hey. :-)

We had a really nice conversation with a pair of actual sisters doing Tai Chi. Normally we wouldn't approach people exercising, but they actually stopped to come talk to us. The older one of them had moved to Boston for work, lived there for 14 years, and just came back to Taiwan to visit family. She's not Christian herself, but she noticed that pretty much all Christians more or less get along except for Jehovah's Witnesses, who no one seems to like. Simply put, she wanted to know why. We talked for about a half hour (It was kind of nice to use English), she wrote down our website and said she'd check it out.

Daan Park's southwest entrance

Also, this week we had a hall cleaning. We have quite a large hall, and it includes the missionary home too, but about fifty people showed up so it went quickly. I like the brooms they use here, none of that fancy plastic bristles and ergonomic design. It's bamboo with sticks tied to it, and it works pretty well!

Ryota and Yang Jie, working hard!

We also had to sweep the street outside the hall, which was interesting... every time a car came by it would drop more leaves, so we had to do it again. I think it lasted exactly two minutes after we all left. That said, it was a pretty good witness- most places, religions included, that hire foreigners use them as kind of trophies- "look, we hired a foreigner, so we must be good, or else why would he work for us?"- and as a result most foreigners working for Taiwanese companies have something to do with management or customer relations. So when people drove by and saw a bunch of foreigners sweeping the street of all things, it made an impression- people stopped to talk to us about it!

Ryota again, joined by Br. Dai and Ahda

One last thing- here's another shot of trash time. When you hear Fur Elise blasting down the street, rush outside with all your trash and throw it in the trucks! Quick, before they leave!

Which results in this madness! :-)

Mason only has a couple days left before he leaves. :-( Although, Terry says he's found an English brother looking for a room for three months who will be moving in on the first, so at least we won't have a problem with rent.

See you next time!

Loose Ends 千頭萬緒

 (What day is it again?)

The last couple of weeks have not been conducive to good blog posting, unfortunately. First I got sick, then my Final Test (*ominous lightning*) happened, then I got sick again. I'm completely well now, though, and quite happy about it! So this post might be a bit all over the place, mostly because I simply haven't had any really big, photograph-worthy things happen in the last week.

So, here's something that happened a little while ago: Mafia Night!

The Korean brother covering his mouth was the Mafia, as it turns out. Jerk killed me!

Mafia is a pretty simple game: You hand out cards with secret character assignments. People are either the Mafia, a Doctor, a Policeman, or Civilians. There's one each of Doctor and Cop, two or three Mafia and everyone else is a Civilian. The Civilians have to figure out who the Mafia are just by talking to everyone, and if they can get enough people to vote they can eliminate someone. The Mafia are also trying to have the majority, but they know who each other are and can work together to eliminate threats. The Cop can know the truth about people, but has to make sure the Mafia don't know who he is (or else they'll kill him immediately), and the Doctor can save people's lives if he guesses they're about to die. It's usually a pretty fun game if everyone gets into it, but considering we had English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean being thrown around... the chaos made it even more fun :-)

Service has been good, as usual. Unfortunately I haven't gone out as much as I've wanted to lately- that final test was brutal, and it didn't help that I was sick when I needed to be studying for it! It worked like this: Our class went to the same classroom as usual, but instead of our normal teacher (Qiu Laoshi 丘光華老師) we had a proctor watching over us. The test had several parts: First, they read off series of sentences and we had to either figure out which was was correct, or which one had an error in it. Next, a reading comprehension; read a paragraph in characters and answer questions on it. Then a slightly different paragraph; this one was full of holes, and we had to write in the word we thought could go there (kind of like Mad Libs but more formal). Lastly, we were taken aside by the proctor, shown a picture and asked to tell a story about the picture. It was quite stressful- the final test is a full 25% of the semester's grade- but I think I did pretty well! I won't hear my score until Monday, but safe to say I didn't get 0, and I also probably didn't get 100.

Near Dongmen Night Market, but in the daytime

Of course, right after that I got sick again- perfect timing for the week-long vacation between semesters! My cold had gotten up into my sinuses and I had an infection. I needed antibiotics... happily, this is Taiwan and not America, so getting antibiotics was literally as easy as walking to the pharmacy down the street from my house and asking them for some. They made sure I didn't want painkillers, then gave me a week's worth of antibiotics for $12, no doctor necessary.

So, longtimers, do you remember in my very first post how I mentioned bringing cheese to Taiwan? Well, I did. I brought three kinds of very hard cheese in my luggage, and after holding on to them for two weeks with no refrigeration, finally put them in Tan Jiemei's refrigerator... where I forgot about them for about a month. When I finally remembered, I figured they were definitely too old, and Tan Jiemei probably threw them out anyway, so I forgot about them.

Well, last week she gave them back. Sure enough, they looked rotten, covered in white mold... but when sliced open, the mold was only about an eighth of an inch deep! Cheese is basically mold anyway, so...

Delicious! Fried eggs and cheese. I had no oil so fried them in cheap wine

Hooray cheese! (As it turns out, you actually can get cheese here, it's just really expensive and at specialty stores.)

One day, we were also invited to take a ferry north from Danshui to... the other half of Danshui, across the river.

Ferry! Note Mason's stylish hat.

This ferry ride was awesome- once we had gotten underway, they allowed us to stand on the deck and walk around to the front of the boat, so most of the way there Joseph, Nikolai and I posed heroically on the bow, riding out the waves. It was both cool and cold!

Giancarlo and his fiancee, Sara

Unfortunately, besides being very cold on the coast, most of the shops were closed because of Chinese New Year. The Chinese really only have one vacation a year, but man do they make sure it counts!

Also, People Of Sacramento: Do you know Mike Miller? Mikey, are you reading this? Because I swear, if I can find out who rides this motorcycle, I'm giving her your number.

I'm assuming it's a girl, but in hindsight I actually have no idea...

Another day out in service. Ryota and I were working with this little guy, Boyi. He is probably the friendliest ten year old I've ever met- I don't think a single person walked past us that he didn't try to talk to! He also totally stole most of our doors, which we were both okay with since his Chinese is better than ours.

Ten year olds speak better than I can... practice, practice.

Over the weekend, we also visited the Daan Jade Market, which is built underneath a freeway overpass near my school. They had a lot of really cool things in there- jades, paintings, porcelain, jewelry, calligraphy, tea accessories...

I didn't buy anything, but if I ever get a job here, I'm coming back!

This shot is on the way to a study's house for dinner, in Yonghe District. There is just no way a car could fit on this street.

I kind of like this, though- it makes the city lively and friendly!

This last Monday, though, we went to tour the Taiwan Branch. They've got 42 Bethelites living there now- up from 35 last year!

Hi guys!

Here in Taiwan, besides all the administrative work from the Taiwan area- Kingdom Hall purchasing and maintenance, conventions, etc- their primary work is Mandarin Chinese audio recordings. All the Mandarin audio you hear in our organization comes from Taiwan. Besides that, they have a (really small! One guy!) printery, where they print magazines in the various native Taiwanese languages, and they occasionally assist Hong Kong branch with small tasks too.

Picture of the first Kingdom Hall in Taiwan, 1958

It was cool visiting them. They're definitely more laid back than Wallkill was, but in fairness, they have about 1/85th as many people!

One last picture. Last night after some evening service, a bunch of us brothers went out to Xiaolongbao. Good food man! The Korean brother in this picture, Hanji, had somehow never eaten xiaolongbao before, so it was an important educational experience!

The brother on the right, Yang Jie, had already eaten all his dumplings...

But things should pick back up pretty soon. I've been making plans to go on an overnight trip out in the countryside in a few months, that should be great fun!

I do have one sad announcement to make: Mason has decided that he is, without a doubt, going home. His plane leaves on the 24th. He hopes to quickly save up enough money and finish his Associate's degree so that he can come back, hopefully within six months. I'm very sad to see him go, but I hope that his plans prove successful and he is indeed able to return in a timely manner.

My class starts again next Wednesday- I hope I passed! :-D

Yehliu Geopark 野柳地质公园

(Venture forth!)

Hi everyone. So, I'm sick. I'm almost well now, but for the last five or six days I've been in various states of sick, so there really hasn't been too much to blog about. But it has been a while, so here's some pictures from a trip I took to Yehliu Geopark.

I woke up early in the morning and met some friends at a cafe. There were five of us in total: Myself, David and Sarah Llach, from Spain and New Zealand respectively (by way of Australia), Josh, from Australia and nowhere else, and Santiago, from Spain by way of China (he's moving to Taiwan permanently so I can post pictures of him). Mason and Harry were both invited, but they didn't want to come.

Artsy introduction shot! From the left, Santiago, Sarah, Josh and David

We took a bus for about an hour and a half to a small port city on the eastern side of Taiwan. It probably has a name, but I am unaware of it.

Josh is taking a picture of the fish we could see through the crystal-clear water. Sadly, his camera is better than mine and I couldn't take their picture.

We walked for a while until we found the entrance to the Geopark itself. Yehliu is, I believe, the remnants of a volcanic eruption on the coast of Taiwan. The lava poured down the hillsides and into the ocean, where it formed some incredibly interesting formations. Then, after a few tens of thousands of years of plate tectonics, the island rose slightly, exposing these awesome rocks for us to see.

On the walk to the park. Some fog rolled in from the ocean...

It's a very popular spot for Taiwanese tourists to go, but is mostly unknown to foreigners,so I'm happy the friends told us about it. Unfortunately, it was very crowded when we first went in...

...but most of those people were part of tour groups, which didn't go very far into the park. So soon, it went from this:

They call this rock the Queen's Head... I guess they didn't like their queen?

To this:

Much better!

First, the path took us down by the ocean.

The sand was mostly made of seashells and coral, and was very sharp but beautiful.

The tides make very interesting patterns in the basaltic rock. It's also littered with thousands of small tide pools.

Beginning to climb higher...

This little inlet is connected to the ocean through a maybe three-inch crevice in the rocks.

Another angle.

Soon, the path began climbing steeply up the mountain.

Aww.

Santiago is easily surprised!

On the way up, we saw one of the best trees ever:

Which, naturally, led to this:

I probably wasn't allowed to do this.

 At the top of the mountain, we had a very interesting experience. At the very top of the path, there was a red pagoda with a granite floor, with an eight-sided table in the middle of it. We were tired, so we sat down in the pagoda and brought out our snacks. The mist was heavy up there, and while we could see the ocean right around us we couldn't see much else.

Looking down from the pagoda. For some reason, I never
took a picture of the pagoda itself... sorry!

 As we sat, chatting and eating off-brand Pringles, we saw three silhouettes approaching us from the path. It was three Chinese people- not unusual, okay, but these were actual Chinese people, from China. (We could tell from the accent- Mainlanders have very strong "R" sounds, whereas Taiwanese people tend to drop their "H"'s.) So we invited them to sit down with us in Chinese, and I think they agreed more out of surprise we could speak Chinese than anything. We got to talking- where are you from, etc- and it came out pretty fast that we five were originally from hugely different areas of the world. They were amazed, and asked how we became friends. We told them about our volunteer work, teaching people about the Bible. For whatever reason, Santiago had actually brought a Bible (in Simplified Chinese, too- perfect for Mainlanders!), so he got it out and showed it to them. They were surprised again, and admitted they didn't know much about the Bible. So for the next hour or so, in a pagoda on top of a misty mountain by the ocean, we studied the Bible with them.

After that awesome break in the day (they took invitations and said they'd check out our website- Santiago knows more what to do next) we took a look at the time and decided to head back. We hit one last interesting place that we hadn't visited yet:

The Moon. Or, pretty close.

It's just solid, flat rock, with really weird patterns in it.

This did bring us back to the populated areas, though...

...which wasn't a bad thing, because here's Santi, preaching like a boss again.

There's a crab in this tide pool!

Yehliu Geopark is one of the more interesting natural parks I've ever visited, and we didn't see it all- there are caves you can dive into, if you're brave! That will have to wait for another time. Also, Mason's sister Kayla left us earlier this week. I totally didn't get to say goodbye- I went to sleep early (sick), before they got home from visiting with friends, and when I woke up she had already gone to the airport. But it's alright, Mason says she didn't say goodbye to him, either, and he actually dropped her off!

This next week- Tuesday, actually- is the final test for this quarter's Chinese lessons. I'm using my sick time well by studying hard- hopefully it goes well! And hopefully, I'll be completely well by then too! :-)