Yilan 宜蘭

(Another quick trip!)

One day last week, I was out in the city, biking between a private student's house and my school, when I got a call from a sister in our congregation: "Hey, this Thursday do you want to go to Yilan for a day?" I thought, I've never been to Yilan. Sure! So I agreed, took the day off Thursday, and went to Yilan with a few friends!

(This week I actually went three places: Yilan, Kinmen and Xiamen. I was originally going to put all of them into one post, but Yilan is different enough from Kinmen and Xiamen that it might be a little confusing... so I'll have a separate post up about Kinmen and Xiamen soon. Like, in the next few days.)

All together, there were eight of us going:

Left to right: Sr. Wang, Sr. Chen, Yijin, Ginger, Felicia, Ryota, Xiaorong (and me behind the camera)

Sisters Wang and Chen were very kind and offered to drive us to Yilan, rather than have us take the train over. Road trip! Of course, Yilan is only like an hour away, so it wasn't all that much of a road trip... but for Taiwan, an hour's drive is really far away!

The road was winding and led through the northern mountains of Taiwan, and included an incredibly long tunnel directly beneath one of the mountains. After what seemed like an eternity of amber lights and close air, we emerged... in Yilan!

Well, near Yilan anyway.

Yilan is a really nice little town! It's on the northeastern coast of Taiwan, and before Keelung was built up in the late Qing Dynasty, it was the second largest port in Taiwan. Unfortunately for the people of Yilan, Keelung's port turned out to be really good, so after its opening the majority of the cargo traffic in and out of Taiwan's north switched to Keelung and left Yilan a sleepy little fishing/agricultural town that's gotten a little artsy in its dotage.

I mean, look at that train station. It's got a giraffe on it!

I'll give it to the civic planners of Yilan, they've done a good job. It probably helps that the buildings aren't nearly as tall as Taipei's, but all the places we went to felt like they had a lot more air and sunlight then I've gotten used to having. 

And look at that street! Beautiful!

 A lot of people, in Yilan and Taipei both, actually aren't paid to work on beautifying the city; they just do it in their spare time because they like to plant plants. I caught this guy hard at work in his little green corner:

Nice job man!

After a little debate, we decided to head over to Jimmy Park first, mostly because it was sunny out and we figured it would be better in the light. That's really it's name, by the way; apparently there was an artist named Jimmy who the city of Yilan invited to design their park, and his name got attached to it in the process. It's more than just a park; when I think of parks, I tend to think of plants, but this 'park' incorporated sculptures and buildings into its design. It's pretty cool actually, and made for lots of interesting pictures!

Just chillin' on a safe, as you do

This building is actually only like 15 feet tall!

This one is approximately 2.2 Xiaorongs tall

Group shot!

We didn't really do all that much in Jimmy Park, just kinda walked around and played on the art. By the way, you can totally play with the art, none of that 'no touching' junk here. It's fun to play sometimes! 

The Entrance

Who is real and who is fake?

That's a fish face. I'm a fish.

Ryota is a cool guy. His personality is a little serious, in the typical Japanese fashion, but he can relax and have a good time with friends just like anyone else. Which leads to awesome pictures like this one.

I AM HAVING FUN NOW

After messing around in the park for a couple hours, we went and got some lunch- just typical Chinese food, nothing too remarkable- and began puzzling out how we could get from where we were to the museum. 

Happily, we had Ginger and a map!

It wasn't too hard- Yilan is much smaller than Taipei- and after a short drive, we arrived at Lanyang Museum. 

It's that building that fell over.

Xiaorong apparently has wanted to go to this museum for a little while, so, you know, why not? Its focus is on Yilan and its surrounding areas- mostly natural history and anthropology. Unfortunately for me, it had almost nothing in English, so the amount of information I got out of it won't exactly win me any awards. (If I had to, I was physically capable of reading most of the signs inside, but it's a lot of hard work and my brain got tired after reading the fourth or fifth exhibit about Yilan's animals. After that, I kind of just looked at the pretty pictures and bothered one of the Taiwanese people nearby if I had a question- mostly, they were ok with helping me out.)

Despite my limitations, the museum and its surroundings were remarkably beautiful!

Not a bad group of people, either!

Walking the path to the museum's entrance

Since the building has such an interesting shape, the perspectives you can get inside it are... well, interesting. Sometimes it's hard to tell which way is up!

Main lobby

Looking down from the top

The exhibits are structured into floors- you climb to the top of the building first and work your way down, and as you can see from the above picture, they're all enclosed in the same space without any real walls separating them. Very cool building!

After checking the exhibits out for a while, we stopped at the coffee shop-

-always very important-

-and then hung out outside for a little while. Taiwan is beautiful, you know that?

Reflecting pond outside the museum

Just checkin' out the nature, man

Sadly, it was beginning to get a bit late, and some of us still had to go to work that evening! So, after a delicious, if a little hurried, dinner of onion pancakes, we piled back into the cars and drove back to Taipei. Nice little day trip!

The next post I'll put up will be about a larger trip I took last weekend to the Taiwanese-controlled island of Kinmen 金門 and its neighbor, the Chinese-controlled city of Xiamen 廈門. I hope to have that one up within the next couple days, so please be patient! :-)

A New Year 一個新的年

(And it's been a good one so far!)

We start this post long ago, in the far-away time of 2014. It was a Taiwanese winter night, and excitement was in the air- for very soon, it would not be 2014, but 2015! The future was upon us, and we were about to commemorate it by watching explosives being launched off a tall building. Last year, I was able to watch this show from Br. Liang's roof with about twenty other brothers and sisters, but he's been called to Bethel, so this year I called a few friends up and we headed over to XinYi street to watch the show up close and personal.

So many people!

Despite all the people, it was actually pretty sedate. There was a band playing on our street corner, traffic had been stopped, but there wasn't any drinking or fighting, like you might expect- Taiwanese people are really polite! We managed to get pretty close to 101, considering we headed out at 11pm and the show started at midnight, eventually ending up only three blocks away from its base. Someone in 101 messed up, because this year there was no countdown, but suddenly-

Fireworks!!

It was a nice show, too! Even the band stopped playing to watch. The show got bigger and bigger as smoke began to fill the air...

Still going!

And many nice pictures were taken...

The one common unifying factor...

...but during the show, I happened to see a camera drone silhouetted against the glare of the fireworks. Whoever owns that drone has got to win the award for "best fireworks picture", definitely.

We eventually went home to greet the new year properly with sleep. The next day was awesome, because it was a rare vacation! The Taiwanese don't really do vacations from work- there might be federal holidays, sure, but you've still gotta go in to work. It's true that January 1st was a day off, but we had to make up for it the previous week by going into work on Saturday- you wouldn't want productivity to be impacted, would you? The only real time off everyone gets is for Chinese New Year- although I will say, everyone gets a solid month off for CNY, and that's on top of the traditional extra month's salary worth of bonus everyone gets paid! So they do make up for it.

In any case, the weather reacted to our defining time with a new number by becoming hot again.

Beautiful sky!

It was really nice, actually- even though the sun was very strong, the air was still quite cool, and it was a very pleasant day to be at our witnessing stand.

Although the sisters worried about getting a tan...

Even the dogs got out for some air!

Happily for the sisters, the weather was only bright and sunny for that one day, and as soon as the cloud rolled in with their rain we were back to our usual winter temperatures of about 55-60 degrees. Speaking of, I hear parts of Canada and northern America are colder than Mars right now! (Seriously, Google it, it's crazy!)

Service group, all bundled up

Standing next to me in the picture above is our brother David Berube, from Boston Chinese. He was only out here for a couple weeks, taking a tour of Asia and scouting the place out... but who knows what the future holds? It was cool getting a chance to know him, to meet more members of our worldwide brotherhood.

A little later, Brandy had a great idea to go up to Danshui to see the sunset, so we gathered up some friends and headed off!

:-D

I hadn't been up to Danshui in close to six months. It's a nice place, a little crowded, but in a slower way than the crowds in the center of the city... if that makes any sense. Although it was the same  sunset, we all had different reactions to it. I thought it was very relaxing...

Brandy thought it was amusing...

Joe was inspired...

Ginger was annoyed. But maybe it was just me.

Right as the sun began to dip beneath the horizon, a fisherman realized his chance and quickly posed for the cameras!

Well done sir!

Looking back at our group

 After the sun went down, we all went into the night market for some delicious squid... among other things.

Why yes, that is fried pregnant fish for sale, why do you ask?

We also convinced Jenny to get ice cream from this Turkish ice cream stand. I think I've put a video of this on the blog before- basically it's these two overweight Turkish guys who dance and mess with you, almost but not quite giving you your ice cream, pretending to drop it... the more fun you are the more ice cream they give you. I have no idea how they got the idea to come to Taipei and do this, but it's hilarious!

No, really... you can take it... trust him...

After we'd wandered around, bought a few things, drank some beer, we eventually decided to head back and caught one of the last trains back into town.

Joe was plum tuckered out.

 All of this was very fun! Even while out in the door to door ministry, we made sure to keep some time open for fun!

Just for kids you say?

Besides all of these activities, we've had some pretty cool announcements. The first, and most awaited, is that we will finally be splitting into two congregations! We've been talking about it for years, but it's official- on March 1st, Taipei Daan Congregation will split off from Taipei South and have their own arrangements. Not only that, but also Taipei South is getting a new name- Taipei Zhongzheng! See, Taipei South was originally the only congregation in all of Taipei- so then it was just called Taipei. Eventually it split, and then we had Taipei North and Taipei South, then East, then West, and as we started dividing more and more we had to pick smaller, more detailed names... basically, although we're called Taipei South, there are more southerly congregations than us and it doesn't make sense for us to hold on to the name anymore.

At least we're still Taipei!

We also had four new elders appointed, and five servants! Some of them already had these privileges before and were simply confirmed here, but to others this is a new privilege of service. We're really doing great!

And new people are taking an interest every day!

Sorry this post took so long, and in the end isn't very descriptive. I've gotten sick in the last couple days- nothing serious, but it's annoying and makes putting big posts like this together a little difficult. I'll do better next time! :-)