Tang's Taiwan: Congregation 會眾

(Changes, all the time!)

Hi everyone! Normally I try to update just about every week, but if you notice my timeline to the right, it's been a bit longer than that. I have a good reason, I swear! It's a good story too...

So the first thing that happened (you're just gonna have to wait, ha) was a going away party for two of our missionaries, Kent and Huey Huang. They've received a circuit overseer assignment, so for the first time in 17 years they'll be moving out of the missionary home and visiting other congregations. We're sad, of course, but it's a good sad; they're moving forwards and having new experiences.

It also gave us an excuse to have a party!

The party was fun! We rented out a floor of a building a little way away from the territory and invited all of the Huang's friends. 17-year missionaries have a lot of friends; there were at least 250 people in the room! Everyone brought food and drinks to share, such as these pizzas:

Classic flavors?

The one on the left is breaded pineapple and shrimp pizza, with tangy sauce; the one on the right is banana chicken pizza. Points for creativity! People also brought lots of noodles, dumplings, sweets, and one generous person with very poor judgement brought a box of stinky tofu. Not that choudoufu is bad to eat, it tastes pretty good actually, but it is incredibly stinky- not the best choice for a party. :-)

After hanging out and eating for a while, we had a couple of activities, and although I didn't know it at the time, I had to go onstage. I was talking with one of my Japanese friends, Yang Jie, when two other Japanese brothers walked over and began speaking to him in Japanese. Apparently they decided amongst themselves that I had to join in... so when they went up to sing a song, they dragged me along.

It wasn't bad though! Yang Jie is the one in the middle wearing glasses.

We sang three verses, the first one in Korean, then Japanese, then English, with the chorus for every verse in Chinese. I won't say we were good, necessarily, but it was fun anyway.

After that, some people had gotten together and prepared a short play for Kent and Huey.

Look at them go!

It was about Abraham and Sara, and drew comparisons between Jehovah's new assignment for them (leaving Ur) and Kent and Huey's new assignment. It was also very funny, because Liang Teng and his wife, Yao, kept 'forgetting' whether they were supposed to be Abraham and Sara or Kent and Huey... "I wonder if the wilderness has 3G phone coverage???" Also, Liang Teng's beard was totally made of electrical tape.

Xie Zhixiang- the standing guy on the right- got to be the voice of God!

It was also a great change for Joseph and Joel to meet a lot of new friends, particularly since Joe tried his hand at bartending!

Not quite ergonomic...

This is a bad picture. :-)

Later in the week, we three went up to Ximending. Ximending is a very trendy spot in Taipei; I had heard a lot about it, even before I came to Taiwan, but I had yet to actually go. It was... interesting!

Trendy!

It genuinely was pretty cool! It's billed as the "42nd st" of Taipei, lots of shops, lots of theaters, lots of people. When we first got off the subway, we were greeted by a live street performer singing Chinese pop music:

It pays to be tall!

I tried to record some of her music, but it didn't turn out all that good- sorry! I've started not bringing my bag everywhere I go- not that it's not useful, but I'm carrying that thing loaded down with school books and magazines so much that my back is starting to hurt! I didn't bring it to Ximending, which means I didn't bring my actual camera. It also means I didn't have much money on me, which turned out to be unfortunate...

In the middle of Ximending, they have the Red House:

Nice red house!

It was built by the Japanese in the early part of the 20th century. It housed the first colonial governor, and after he moved out to his more permanent residence it became a Japan away from Japan for the people of Taipei (called Taihoku then), with all the comforts and entertainments of home. Today it still has some cool shops in it, obviously it's also had Ximending grow up around it, and it also has Lego miniatures of a bunch of historic buildings!

Why Lego? I don't know, but that would've been a great job to have!

So while walking around the alleys, checking out the shops, we found this vintage clothing shop that sold rock clothing- leather jackets, Ramones shirts, lots of spikes. We went inside and started looking around, while the two young women working at the store went over into a corner and started giggling. Before five minutes went by, one of them asked me "So... we were wondering... could we take pictures of you guys wearing some of the clothes in the store, and we could use them in advertising?" They said they couldn't give us anything for free, because they weren't the boss, but they did offer us a 90% discount on anything we wanted to buy. (Whyyyy didn't I bring money?!)

So that's why this post is late. We took a bunch of photos and they said they'd email them to me when they had them ready, and I was waiting for that. I sadly don't have them yet, but I figured too much time had gone by and I needed to write a post anyway. Hopefully they email them to me, but actually I need to go back (probably this weekend) with money so I can buy some clothes. They actually have some really cool stuff!

Random temple we saw!

This is a... cow?

That cow had a plaque near its feet that explained that it represents the creative spirit, randomly mutating into never before seen creations... I just like that the cow has wheels.

Also, have you ever seen a Chinese typewriter?

Very, very happy we can use computers now...

You had to move the stylus around on the grid until you found the character you needed, then push down and it would stamp the paper. It only has the most common characters, of course; if you needed to write something that the typewrite did not have a key for, you wrote it in by hand.

So out in service the other day...

I had a really cool experience in service recently. We were out doing door-to-door work, as we like to do, and after a couple hours we sat down to take a break in a nearby park. As we sat there, a guy walked over into our group and began counting aloud, eventually asking "Why are twelve people all dressed up sitting in this park?" He was standing near me, so I answered him, explaining who we are and what we were doing. He said, "Oh yes, Jehovah's Witnesses... that's an American religion like the Mormons, right? You're American, right?" I said that yes I am American, but we're not an American religion- just look around at all the nationalities we have just in this small group- and we're really not like Mormons.

So he sat down next to me, started talking, and to make a long story short I gave him the Good News from God brochure (he said "Ah, so many Christians talk about their 'good news', but I have no idea what 'good news' they're talking about!"), a bible, and got his contact info. He actually lives in Hong Kong and was just in Taipei on business, but we're going to try to talk using Skype.