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!