Two Out of Taipei
06 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
We’re here in our new home of Jinan China. The past few months have been filled with travel and friends. Becky and Nemes, Jessica’s Grand Rapids friends came to visit in Taipei and we traveled all around. We went to Taichung or more accurately Waipu I think. It’s the home town of my friend Bonnie Yao and she invited us all down for a barbecue and to stay the night. We rode the bus with Bonnie from Taipei and went to this new bus station that we’d never seen before but was brilliant, large and clean and efficient. Bonnie made me try to tell the clerk what kind of tickets we needed in mandarin and I failed almost immediately and she bailed me out. Good ol Bonnie. I really miss her but she’s buying a webcam and microphone so we should be able to Skype soon. Her barbecue was great. Jessica and I burned the sausages though and Bonnie’s grandma had to come over and scrape off the cancerous bits. We grilled huge green peppers and mushrooms and pork and Bonnie’s dad bought us Heinekin. I even got to try some of Grandma Yao’s home brewed rice wine. It was deliciously strong. Then we went to the local night market which resembled a small town carnival with ring tosses and lots of other games. One thing of note there was the papaya milk that Bonnie made us try. Exquisite. If anytime you are at the Waipu night market, get the papaya milk.
Afterword, we took a train to Kenting, swam and drank beers on the beach. I had a few too many and made quite a fool of myself, one of which ways was speaking horrible slurred Chinese to almost anyone who passed me by.
Next, Hualien, where we had an awesome hot pot meal and rode scooters up and down Toroko Gorge. It was a blast.
My parents came when we got back to Taipei and with them we went off to Penghu Island. I tiny island, only about 13 kilometers across. We rented a car from our B&B and drove around the entire island and the gas meter never went below Full. The highlights of Penghu were eating cactus ice cream underneath a 300 year old Banyan tree, riding bicycles to the beach, seeing the whale cave, and just enjoying being on vacation. It’s strange living on a tropical island and taking a vacation on a smaller more tropical island. Penghu was very flat too, which was also strange because Taiwan is so mountainous and I’m used to that scenery and then to not see any mountains for a few weeks is a small shock. It’s kind of like traveling from Michigan where you can only usually see a couple of miles due to the hills and trees to South Dakota where one can see 50 to 100 miles on a long stretch of rode. When I went to South Dakota to work with Habitat for Humanity I met a man who said he got claustrophobic coming to the Midwest for that very reason. But, back to Penghu, we went on a boat tour which was really fun. It took us South a couple of dozen nautical miles It was great to see my parents after not really seeing them for so long. I really missed them.
Then, it was a mad dash to clean out the apartment and make everything look somewhat presentable to H.W. our landlord so we could get our deposit back. We had a lot of furniture that had to go and only a few days to sell it. Which meant we weren’t able to sell it, so we shipped it all down to Bonnie’s parents. She wanted to use the couch
Then we flew off to China (and started a new blog). It was weird leaving Taiwan. It felt like leaving home.
