Playing Tourist in Taipei, Part 1 (Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, Longshan Temple)

This week Floyd and I took a short vacation in Taipei (belatedly celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary).

It was fun traveling there on the High Speed Rail!

 

Above and below: these were the views from the windows of our room in the Sunworld Dynasty Hotel.

One of the first things we did after we arrived was to visit the famous Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall.

We were told that the scaffolding across the front had nothing to do with construction but was actually a subtle political statement by a party opposed to the memory of Chiang Kai-Shek and his politics.

This was a sign by the entrance to the museum area inside the Memorial Hall.

A scenic spot for an anniversary picture by a turtle-filled pond in the Memorial complex.

 The next touristy site we visited was Taipei's Longshan Temple.

We were impressed by the colorful, intricately-carved figures on the roofs of the various buildings in the temple complex.

The scenic man-made waterfall below adorns the temple's front courtyard.

Our vacation in Taipei has just begun!  Next up: the Taipei Zoo!

 

Playing Tourist in Taipei, Part 2 (Taipei Zoo)

Playing Tourist in Taipei, Part 3 (National Museum of History, Botanical Garden, National Palace Museum)

Playing Tourist in Taipei, Part 4 (Taipei 101)

Playing Tourist in Taipei, Part 5 (Sun Yat-sen Memorial)

 

Typhooning with Krosa

Advice for the week: don't bother using an umbrella in a typhoon.

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Yep, it's stormy and windy in Taichung right now. We're in the middle of a typhoon here! This is our third typhoon since we arrived in Taiwan, but the first two both veered off to the north as they approached, so we didn't get the full force of the storms. Actually, the satellite maps online show that this one is veering north too; technically its eye is a little off the northern tip of the island, though much of the storm itself is directly overhead.

For those who don't know, a typhoon is basically the same as a hurricane, just with a different name in a different part of the world. It's categorized the same way, levels 1-5, with 5 being the worst (this one apparently is a level 4). They name them alphabetically each year, too, just like hurricanes (this one has been named Typhoon Krosa).

All last night we kept hearing the wind. It's often windy here, but typhoon wind is like no other kind. Floyd and I have nicknamed it "the Banshee" because of the wailing, shrieking, howling, whistling noises it makes as it tries its best to get into our apartment. We didn't get much sleep last night with the Banshee roaring around us, and today it's even louder.

This morning (Saturday) we had to go to school for a professional development event (which ended several hours early because of the typhoon). Just walking to school was quite an experience. The ground was covered with leaves and sticks and in some places even entire branches that had blown off trees. It wasn't raining much at the time - kind of a heavy drizzle - but the gusts of wind were so strong that we had to literally lean into them to even walk, and once or twice I was physically unable to take a step forward until the gust died down.

The scariest thing I saw on the way was somebody's metal roll-up garage door that had come partially detached and was hanging onto its framework only at the top two corners.  It was flapping like a banner, threatening to go sailing loose at any second.  I hope it never did.  It would have been a flying guillotine.

I discovered that it's no use trying to use an umbrella in a typhoon. First of all, the rain doesn't come straight down; the wind whips it all over so that it can come at you from any given direction at any moment, including horizontally or even straight up. And apart from my umbrella being next to useless anyway, the wind immediately whooshed it inside-out, snapped off a couple of the ribs, and flung them away. I had to point the poor crippled umbrella in the other direction so the wind would blow it right-side-in again, and then quickly furl it up to avoid further damage.

 At school there were branches all over the walkways and driveways, and even two or three entire trees that had blown over! It was the first time I had seen anything like that. 

Fortunately there was no damage to any of the buildings (nor had I seen any in the neighborhood on my way there, apart from the garage door). I did see a trash can, though, overflowing with the mangled remains of shredded umbrellas.  And the playground was a mess of downed branches.

 Well, we rushed through our meetings so people could get home sooner. There were teachers there from all of Morrison's three campuses plus the satellite school, which are all in different cities, and the others all had several hours' drive to get home (they had spent Friday night here in Taichung). We were concerned about those from Bethany campus, in Taipei, since that's very close to the eye of the storm. People kept saying it's not good weather for a big bus to be out on the highways, and not a good direction for said bus to be heading. There was some talk about sending them by train instead, but the high speed rail isn't running, and I don't know if the regular train runs during typhoons either. Hopefully they've made it back okay by now.

 

Later I found out that the wind broke a window in the door of one of the elementary classrooms.  It wasn't that a stray branch smashed into the glass or anything.  The force of the wind itself just shattered the glass!  Although a teacher was in there at the time, fortunately she was at the other end of the room and no one was hurt.    

Floyd and I were able to catch a ride home afterwards with someone else who lives in our apartment building. We were especially thankful since the rain was pouring down heavily by then, and had been for several hours. When we got home, we were surprised to see that Krosa had invaded our apartment! The living room floor was wet where water had come through the sliding glass door that leads to the covered balcony, but that wasn't the worst of it. The bedroom had a lot of leakage, both from the window and the air conditioning unit. My dresser and everything on it, two rugs, and a large section of floor were totally soaked. Not only that, but the water was dripping down from the window area inside the concrete wall to the floor. Or to be more specific, I should say it was seeping down UNDERNEATH the paint. So in several places the paint was bulging with rivulets of water underneath, pooling on the floor when it got to the bottom. That was weird!

Anyway, we moved the furniture out of the way and got rid of the dripping rug, and used almost every towel we have in the house, plus a bunch of rags, to soak up the water. But of course it keeps coming in, so we have a load of towels in the washing machine right now, hoping they'll dry before the ones currently on the floor get totally saturated. The air conditioning unit is letting water in all around it, and there isn't much we can do about that except stuff paper towels in the cracks and change them every few minutes, and keep towels on the floor under it as well.

And of course this whole time the wind is howling and raging and trying to join the rain inside our apartment. Can you hear it? It's really something! We might have to run to the 7-Eleven on the corner and see if they have earplugs, if we want to get any sleep tonight. At least we don't have to worry about the roof leaking, though. That's one advantage of living on the seventh of twelve stories!

The wind is screaming in through the air conditioning units, and we keep having to go wring out our towels. It's ridiculous! The rain is coming in so hard it's spurting up like little fountains under the windows. We can't keep up with it, and we're out of dry towels. Building a dike around parts of our floor would help us more than trying to sop up the water. I don't know how we're going to sleep tonight, because if we aren't there to keep wringing out the towels, the water will spread out all over the floor and get all over the apartment. Yikes!

Well, I'd better close so I can go help Floyd deal with Krosa's mess.  Wish us luck!

An Exciting (?) Visit to a Taiwanese Sheep Farm

Recently I had the opportunity to visit a sheep farm up in the mountains with some friends. It was a funny cultural experience for me!

Chingjing Farm (also spelled Qingjing, Cingjing, or Chingling) is a green, hilly ranch with paved walkways for people to stroll on and watch sheep graze.

  The place was full of Taiwanese tourists from the city, all eager to see, touch, and feed the sheep. 

  

Now, maybe it's my Kenyan upbringing, where sheep and goats are pretty much everyday sights even in the city. But the idea of going somewhere and paying money just to watch sheep strikes me as extraordinarily ridiculous!

Still, it was pleasant to walk around in such a lush, green area, especially after weeks of seeing almost nothing but city.

It was a drizzly holiday weekend, and the place was absolutely thronged with people with umbrellas.

I wonder what the sheep show was; we didn't have time to see it.  However, Floyd's enactment of what he thinks a sheep show must be is pretty hilarious!

I have to say that although I would have considered it pointless to go to a farm to watch the sheep, I had a lot of fun watching the tourists watch the sheep!

Adventures in a Taiwanese Hospital

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I wasn't planning on doing much blogging this weekend, because Floyd and I were going to take the high speed rail to Taipei and spend a couple of days there for our 5th anniversary (which was yesterday). We had hotel reservations and plans to visit museums, the zoo, and the tallest building in the world. But, it seems we weren't intended to do that this weekend.

It all started Wednesday morning, which began as a regular school day as far as I was concerned. Floyd was still asleep when I left for school (since he doesn't start work till a little later). I didn't know anything was going on until recess, when a friend of ours who's a nurse came and called me urgently from my classroom, explaining that they thought Floyd had appendicitis and were rushing him to the emergency room. He had called in with pain in his lower right abdominal area, and they thought he should get it checked out. The school secretary arranged for a sub for my class for the rest of the day, so I was able to come along when they took him to Cheng Ching Hospital.

I'll never forget that scary drive!  Floyd was in excruciating pain, and we all thought his appendix was about to burst at any second.  Our friend who was at the wheel drove like a maniac to try to get him there before it was too late, and we were praying hard and reciting psalms and holding our breath as she swerved through traffic and executed all sorts of probably illegal maneuvers.  (Her comment: "I've always wanted to drive like this, and now I have an excuse!")

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Somehow we made it to the hospital (the tall bluish building in the picture) in one piece, and I'm guessing angels were involved in protecting us on the road!  Someone from the school had called ahead, and when we arrived there was an English-speaking doctor (the dad of one of our students) right there waiting for us.

After a brief examination and some questioning, and later some other tests, it was determined that the problem was not Floyd's appendix at all, but a large, impacted kidney stone. That was a relief to me, though no less painful to him.  Later that afternoon he went into surgery to have it removed.

The surgery, which they did orthoscopically (sp?) and under general anesthesia, took just under an hour and a half, and apparently went smoothly. He came out feeling pretty good, all things considered. Because they didn't actually have to make an incision, he ended up in relatively little pain afterwards. It was arranged that Floyd would stay the night for observation (since it was evening by then), and leave the next day. We got a private room on the eleventh floor, where we settled down for the rest of the evening.

While we were in the hospital, we were overwhelmed by the number of people who came by to help. Altogether, I counted twelve or thirteen different people who came by the hospital at different times to see if they could do anything for us. These included students, teachers, parents, and administrators from the school, as well as various other members of Taichung's English-speaking community, many of whom we barely knew, and a couple of whom we hadn't even met before. It was great because the whole time we were there, there was always at least one person who could translate for us. Most of the doctors spoke some English, but most of the nurses and other hospital personnel didn't, and I don't know how we would have managed without translators. One lady's husband had gone to medical school with several of the hospital staff, and so she was able to arrange for the hospital's PR representative to come and see to it that we got extra-good care. (That's how things work here: it's all about who you know.) Several people even brought us food that evening, which was nice since the hospital didn't provide any. (The way it usually works is that patients' family members bring them meals.) Luckily there was a little fridge in our room, and it was soon well stocked with Subway sandwiches, crackers, cookies, a banana, salad, garlic bread, juice, soda, seafood pasta, a breakfast bagel sandwich, soup, potato chips, cake, and rice porridge, which ended up being the only thing Floyd could actually eat that night after his surgery.

I had been planning on spending the night there with him, but by bedtime Floyd said he was feeling so much better that I might as well go home and get some sleep. Instead, one of the teachers from Morrison volunteered to stay over, so that he could help translate if anything came up. So I got a ride home with someone and came back first thing in the morning with a different friend.

Well, Floyd kept improving, and by early Thursday afternoon they let him check out. We took a taxi home and he's been resting in our apartment for the last couple of days. He's not quite back to full health yet, but he seems to feel better all the time, and is well enough to be bored with all the sitting around. I guess that's a good sign! We were even able to go out last night for our anniversary, to a little Japanese-style restaurant a few minutes' walk from our apartment (picture below).

Floyd is planning on going back to work on Monday, especially if he keeps improving at his current rate. In the meantime, we're thankful to God for working everything out so well.  Praise the Lord that there were so many people willing and available to help, from transportation to translation to bringing food to subbing for me at school to holding us both up in prayer. The hospital was very modern and well-equipped, the doctors were experts in their fields, Floyd said the operating room was sterile and everything an operating room should be, and the total bill came to a fraction of what it would have cost back in the States. We are very thankful that everything worked out as well as it did, and we are especially grateful for all the wonderful people who stepped up to help in so many ways.

Hopefully I'll be blogging again in a few weeks with the details of our postponed weekend in Taipei!

Linguistic Misadventures at The Prawn Palace Restaurant

Floyd and I have been in Taiwan for a little over four weeks now, and honestly, it feels like months. In many ways we really feel at home here, and we are confident that this is where we belong right now. We love life in this part of the world and thank the Lord for bringing us here!

 Life isn't without its struggles, though. One of our biggest has been regarding the language. Most people here speak little or no English, and we speak little or no Chinese. That's not a good combination!  We have been taking "survival Chinese" lessons, but it's so hard to remember the words with their confusing tones. I actually find it easier to learn some of the simple characters and their English meanings than to speak or understand spoken Chinese. It's the other way around for Floyd.

A funny example of our struggles to communicate with those around us was when we tried to go out for dinner a couple of weeks ago. We knew there are a lot of little restaurants in our neighborhood, so we set off walking without any particular destination to see what good Chinese food we could find. The first few places we looked at had all-Chinese menus, and we were getting pretty tired and hungry by the time we came to a crowded, partly open-air corner restaurant that we had seen in passing before. As Floyd pointed out, if it's that crowded, the food must be pretty good, so we decided to eat there whether there was an English menu or not. Sure enough, there wasn't one, and we stared helplessly at the page full of Chinese characters that a waiter handed us.

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People at the tables all around us were eating happily, but we had no idea what any of the options on the paper in front of us were. Eventually the waiter came back to take our order. He said things in Chinese that we couldn't understand, and we said things in English that he couldn't understand, and all three of us were getting frustrated and hungry (at least Floyd and I were hungry). Finally Floyd remembered how to say "kung pao chicken" in Chinese, and he said it, and the waiter brightened up and replied happily, pointing to something on the menu. Then Floyd said the word for "rice" and randomly pointed to another menu item, and the waiter went off leaving us wondering exactly what we would get.

Service in the restaurants here tends to be pretty fast no matter how crowded it is. They bring out one dish at a time as the food is ready, instead of waiting to bring the whole meal at once like in America. So first our rice was delivered, and then the waiter brought the kung pao chicken, which was excellent. Half way through that, he brought our mystery item, which turned out to be a dish of prawns. Floyd was totally delighted, as those are one of his all-time favorites. So we had a great meal, including some delicious guava juice. (There's a cooler full of drinks, and you just go and get what you want, and they add it to your bill at the end.)

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Anyway, the total for the meal came to the equivalent of about seven US dollars for the two of us. Not bad, huh?!  (Thank goodness they write their numbers the same way we do, so we had no problem reading how much we had to pay.)

Well, a few days later we felt like eating out again (with prices like that, we can afford to go out for dinner a lot more often here than back in the States!). So we headed back to the same restaurant, which had we nicknamed the "Prawn Palace" since we still have no idea what its real name is. This time I had come prepared: I looked through our notebook of "survival Chinese" materials, and found a section about ordering in restaurants. I had carefully copied out the characters for pork, beef, chicken, fish, rice, noodles, and a few other basic items, along with their English pronunciations. I figured that way we can choose something on the menu and at least have a reasonably close idea of what we'll be getting.

We walked right in and were seated in the same area as before, and the same waiter was assigned to us. He took one look at us and said something to his supervisor that probably meant, "Aw, come on, boss, please don't make me serve these guys again! They don't even know how to communicate!" But he came over with the menu anyway, and I proudly pulled out my handy-dandy little paper with the characters to see what we could order. But unfortunately it wasn't as easy as I had expected. Every dish on the menu was written with at least three or four characters, and I couldn't even find the one that meant chicken, though I knew it had to be there. Finally the waiter came back to take our order, and we still hadn't figured anything out yet. We tried to tell him so, and he tried to tell us something, and then he saw my little paper. Before I could stop him, he took it from me and read the characters I'd written, and I think he thought I had had someone help me write the things we wanted to order. I kept saying, "No, wait, that's not what we want," but he pointed at various things on the menu and said who-knows-what, and finally gave the paper back and left with the menu. Floyd and I were left looking at each other like, "Yikes, what did we just order?"

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Well, apparently we had ordered some kind of spicy chicken dish, because that was the first thing the waiter brought. We discovered a big pot where we were supposed to serve ourselves rice, so we were enjoying our chicken and rice with the pride of those who have triumphed over cultural and linguistic barriers, when the waiter brought a dish of prawns. We hadn't realized we had ordered two items, but that was okay. You always have room for a few good prawns, even if they interspersed with chili peppers. We decided the waiter must have remembered our taste for prawns from last time, though perhaps he thought we needed them spiced up a little now.

Well, about half way through our meal, along came another dish. This one was a platter of boiled cabbage in a beef broth. We had ordered cabbage?! Well, okay. It was pretty tasty, as cabbage goes, and being the only non-spicy item on the table, it was a nice change for our taste buds.

Just when we thought we were about done, the waiter came back with yet another dish: very spicy chopped beef with peppers and vegetables. We couldn't believe all the things we were getting, and wondered what our bill was going to come to this time, but at least we were enjoying a great meal.

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As we sat back in satisfaction, surrounded by our leftovers and feeling that we were doing pretty well at this restaurant, we happened to notice the crowd of people nearby on the sidewalk. Idly we wondered what they were doing or if there was some event about to take place. Then we suddenly saw a waiter handing out menus to them, and realized they were waiting their turn to be seated. Just as that realization hit us both, so did the one that we had just walked right in to our table! You can imagine our feelings of embarrassment, that we had cut to the front of the line and marched in as though we deserved to be seated immediately, while people too polite to call us on it were probably watching in indignation, waiting patiently for their turns. But of course there was nothing we could do about it at that point except vow not to be so ignorant and culturally insensitive next time.

I won't go in to the story of what it took to get a bag for our leftovers (which they do all the time here but we didn't know where to get or how to ask for).  Suffice to say that finally we left full and embarrassed, with our wallet only about $10 lighter.  We still love the Prawn Palace, but I think next time we'll find a friend who speaks Chinese to come with us!


To read more about the Prawn Palace and other eateries Floyd and I like in Taiwan, click here to read my blog post "Some of our Favorite Restaurants".

Or, click here to read about our further dining linguistic misadventures!

Touchdown in Taiwan

Greetings from the beautiful city of Taichung in Central Taiwan. At least, I guess beautiful is relative, but if smog and heavy traffic and trash on the streets doesn't bother you too much, then Taichung is definitely beautiful! We like it, anyway!

It's hard to believe we've been here less than a week and a half. California seems a whole lifetime ago already! We flew in a week ago Thursday, and the principal and his wife picked us up at the airport. The first thing we noticed (besides all the Chinese writing everywhere) was the humidity. It was great for the first couple of minutes; the air felt so rich and thick you could almost chew it, but the heat got to us before we even got to their van in the parking lot. You just have to get used to sweating a lot here, and then it's fine.

At my request, we stopped by the school (Morrison Academy) to see my classroom before they even took us to our apartment. The school is great! Big, modern, high tech, great facilities. My classroom is huge - almost twice as big as the one I taught in last year in the States. It has almost a living-room area in the back, with carpet and couches, which I'm turning into a reading area. (I've been in there almost every day since we got here, arranging things and working on my lessons.)  Anyway, it's a very nice room, and Floyd has helped a lot with moving desks and bookshelves around for me, as well as re-wiring some stuff and getting the four classroom computers set up and ready to go, in a little "computer center" beside the reading area.




Our apartment is great too. The school has provided us with a four-bedroom, two-bath apartment on the seventh story of a twelve-story building in a typical Taiwanese neighborhood. (The apartment building is known to Morrisonians as the "Pink Towers" due to its color.)  Morrison is lending us some furniture until we have a chance to buy our own, although we bought quite a few things already from the teacher who lived in here before us. There is no central air conditioning, but at least there are window units and ceiling fans in the living room and bedrooms. Even so, it can get pretty warm in here. For the first week or so, we ran the a/c on high every night, with the ceiling fan on high too, and still slept with only a sheet (if that) over us. Things got more comfortable when we discovered the other day that what we had thought was the power level on our window unit was actually the thermostat (in degrees Celsius).  Now we know how to make it cool in there!

We haven't seen too many gross bugs since we've been here. We've only encountered two hideously disgusting gigantic cockroaches, one here at home and one at school, both of which Floyd heroically slew for me. Not many mosquitoes, either, although we hear they will become more of an issue in the winter months. But everyone assures us that living on the seventh floor will keep us out of the range of most creepy-crawlies.

The apartment complex is nice as well. It's huge,with three separate buildings in a "U" shape, and a courtyard in the middle. The courtyard is nicely landscaped with trees and flowers, and it even has signs saying what all the plants are. That might be nice if we could read Chinese. There's a little fish pond in the middle, too, and a swimming pool and tennis courts.

We usually take the elevator up to our floor, although sometimes we use the stairs for exercise. The stairway is narrow and steep and very stuffy, and toward the bottom the ceiling gets really low. We know we're getting close to the bottom when we start having to do the limbo as we walk down the steps! Floyd says it feels like walking into a cave. All our Chinese neighbors seem nice, although we can't talk to them except to say a couple of greetings. Very few people here speak English, and although we've been taking Chinese lessons since the beginning of the week, I'll just say that it's a very difficult language! But at least we've been able to say hello when we meet people around the courtyard or in the elevator.











Almost all of our neighbors in our building have little shelves outside their doors where they take off their shoes before they go inside. I guess they aren't worried about anyone taking them, but we take ours off just inside the doorway, just in case, although I'm sure it would be fine. Some of them also decorate the outside of their doors with red and gold banners, which I'm sure say something meaningful in Chinese. I'm looking forward to being able to read the characters someday.










The view from our apartment is great too. We have a narrow balcony off of our living room which looks out into the courtyard, and another across from it off of the kitchen, which overlooks the city. I've never really lived in the city before, and it's kind of nice, especially at night when all the lights are on. We can see a McDonald's from our place, as well as hundreds and hundreds of Chinese signs that we can't read. There's a building under construction right across the street from our balcony, and it's interesting watching their progress on it every day.

The other day the smog unexpectedly lifted, and we saw that we have quite a nice-looking range of mountains not far away beyond the city. Someday we'll have to go check them out, although without a car that might be hard. We don't want a car, though, because we're within easy walking distance of the school. Besides, traffic is crazy here! Every time we go out with people, it seems like we come within a couple inches of being hit or of hitting another car or a scooter. Nobody else seems phased by it, though.

Scooters are everywhere - more people drive them than cars, and they zip in and out of traffic. Even walking doesn't always seem quite safe (although we are getting used to it). There are sidewalks on a lot of streets, but they're usually full of people selling things from carts or stands; and scooters (and often cars as well) park there a lot.

The weather actually has been fairly comfortable lately, or maybe we're just getting used to it. Probably some of each. Our first few days in the country were incredibly hot and humid, but it's been a lot cooler recently. Or I guess I should say, more warm than hot. Apparently a typhoon has been going by somewhere off the coast, and it's brought cloudy skies and pleasant breezes. Right now it's raining, which is kind of nice.

We just got back from shopping and exploring in our neighborhood, which was a pretty wet experience, but fun. We checked out a stationery store, which has all kinds of interesting things but very little of what you'd expect to find in an American stationery store. We enjoyed stopping by a little "tea shop" that someone had taken us to before, where we bought delicious drinks. Teas are VERY popular here, mostly chilled with various flavors. I'm normally not an iced tea fan, but these are different. I ordered an almond milk tea (last time I had mint milk tea), which tastes a lot more like sweetened flavored milk than like tea. Floyd bought a"funland juice," or something like that, both times; it's tangy and fruit-flavored (a little like an orange julius). They have dozens of interesting-looking flavors, all of which I'd like to try sometime - for example, mango milk tea, wheat sprout green tea, passion fruit black tea, and yogurt tea.

We also bought giant mangoes and other fruit from a sidewalk fruit seller just outside our apartment. And we found a grocery store a few blocks away where we bought canned roasted eel in black pepper sauce, and a few other similar delicacies. :-) We're determined not to be the kind of Americans who stick with their Western diet wherever they go and refuse to try local fare!

Local fare here has turned out to be really tasty (not that we expected otherwise). We both love Chinese food, which is a good thing, since that's most of what's available, especially in restaurants. The staff at the school have all been really nice and welcoming, and many have taken us out to eat already. (We've actually only had to make dinner in our apartment twice since we got here! All the free food has been great!!) The restaurants they've taken us out to have all been as unique from each other as most restaurants in the States are, even though they're almost all Chinese. And none of them have provided silverware, so it's a good thing Floyd and I know how to use chopsticks!

The way it usually works is that everyone orders a different dish, each of which provides a small serving size for three or four people, and we each get a little rice bowl. Then we serve ourselves from the big dishes into our rice bowls or small (saucer-sized) plates, and share everything that way. It's been quite delicious, for the most part, although I'll have to get used to the little cups of hot unsweetened green tea they usually serve with the meal.

We actually went to a "tea restaurant" called Cha for Tea in Tiger City (a large mall) last week, where everything was cooked in tea. Imagine soup with tea as the broth, and beef noodles in a tea sauce. I have to admit that was a little strange. So was the green tea-flavored ice cream that came floating in the chilled, unsweetened tea drink that I ordered with my meal. I don't think we'll be eating there again, but that's probably the only place we've been to that I'd say that about.

Probably the biggest challenge we're dealing with is language learning. Wow, Mandarin is really complicated! Pronouncing the unusual sounds in some of the words is hard enough, but saying them in the right tone (there are four) gets really tricky sometimes.  I hope we'll be able to pick it up quickly, at least enough to make ourselves understood. We really want to make friends with our Taiwanese neighbors, but it isn't easy when all we can say is "good morning, how are you?"

In spite of the challenges, I'm so thankful to the Lord for bringing us here and keeping us safe and healthy so far.  What a blessing to get to live and serve Him in this wonderful place!

Last Stateside Update

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It's hard to believe that in just a few short days Floyd and I will be in Taiwan! We have lots to do before then, but I wanted to type a quick update before we leave.

We really enjoyed our two weeks of Pre-Field Orientation with the Association of Christian Schools International in Houghton, New York. We made some great friendships in such a short time, and it was hard to say goodbye to everyone at the end. At least we know that we'll see some of the families again in Taiwan. Others are headed for international schools in places like Ethiopia, South Korea, Ivory Coast, Austria, the Philippines, Senegal, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, Niger, Nigeria, Spain, Ecuador, Thailand, Bolivia, Hungary, and Brazil. You can imagine how fun it was to spend two weeks with people heading for or returning to such a variety of countries! :-)

In the last couple of weeks Floyd and I have also enjoyed spending time with friends and family members we don't see very often (as well as some we do). We have been officially sent off in prayer by both Granada Hills Baptist (where I taught 5th grade for three years) and our adult Sunday school class at Grace Baptist (our home church). It's humbling to have so many wonderful people praying for us and wishing us well in our missionary work.  At least we will still have consistent email access in Taiwan (unlike the year I spent in Nabire, Indonesia, where it was sporadic and unreliable). Hearing from friends back home is a welcome treat in foreign lands, so I hope everyone will stay in close touch! 

Well, Floyd and I will head for the airport this Tuesday evening (July 31st), and our flight leaves from Los Angeles at 1:40 a.m. on August 1st. We'll arrive in Taiwan's capital city of Taipei at about 6:30 a.m. the same day, after a nonstop 14-hour flight (crossing the International Date Line). Someone from Morrison Academy will pick us up and drive us a couple hours to the city of Taichung, where an apartment has been provided for us. (We'll be living on the seventh floor of a twelve-storey apartment building, about ten minutes' walk from the school.) 

We'll have the rest of that week to settle in, then the next week there will be some orientation and training at the school for new staff. Floyd and I will actually be the only new staff on that particular campus (Morrison has four campuses in different cities), so I guess it will probably just be us! We'll also have the first half of our ten-session crash course in Mandarin Chinese. 

The week after that consists mostly of in-services for all the teachers, so it will be nice to meet the rest of the staff at that time. Then the next week is when school starts. That doesn't seem like a lot of time to get my classroom and lessons ready, but I'm sure I'll manage somehow!  I'm planning to post in my blog again within the first few days after we arrive, so hopefully it won't be too long before you hear from us again. 

We really feel encouraged knowing we have so many friends here in the States (and other countries too!) who are keeping us close in their hearts and supporting us in prayer. Your prayers will be an important part of our ministry, as we head for the front lines in God's service. Keep them coming!

A Day at Niagara Falls

Here are a few pictures from our recent excursion to Niagara Falls. 

We took a bus over there for the day, along with lots of other PFO friends. 

The Falls are just as grand and majestic as their reputation claims!

We crossed the bridge to enjoy the view from both the American and the Canadian sides.

It was fun riding the Maid of the Mist right up to the base of the waterfall.

We were given special sandals and rain ponchos (very helpful with all the spray) for our tour of the Cave of the Winds.

One more destination I can cross off my bucket list!

Pre-Field Orientation in Upstate New York

 Here we are in beautiful upstate New York! Floyd and I are here for two weeks of Pre-Field Orientation, designed to prepare us for our upcoming missionary work in Taiwan. We're staying on the campus of Houghton (pronounced HO-tun) College, in a scenic small town area. The campus is full of forest, flowers, and creeks (home to turtles, noisy bullfrogs like the one below, and, I'm told, large fishing spiders). 

I'm not sure how the students can concentrate on their studies in such a beautiful environment! But they're gone for the summer, and now the college has been taken over by about a hundred twenty of us future missionaries, all headed for different missionary schools around the globe. It's been interesting meeting some of them and hearing about where they'll be going.

The Orientation has only just begun, but we've learned quite a bit already. Yesterday the sessions focused on the results of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (personality test) that we had all taken earlier. For those of you who are familiar with this, we discovered that I am an INFJ (introvert, intuitive, feeling, judging; the rarest of the 16 types), and Floyd is an ISTP (introvert, sensing, thinking, perceiving). I know some of you must have taken this test yourselves; we would be interested to know your results if you'd like to share them!

Today the main focus of the seminars was on TCKs, or Third Culture Kids (those who were raised in a culture other than the one their parents are from, and thus have blended the two to create a third culture in their own lives). We will all be teaching TCKs in the various missionary schools we'll be in, so it's important to understand them and the unique issues they face.

Since I am an adult TCK myself, I was asked to sit on a panel this evening to answer some questions about my experiences. There were seven other TCKs on the panel, all answering the same set of questions, and it was great to hear from all of them, most of whom had gone through pretty much the same types of things I have. When TCKs return to their "home" country, they often feel isolated, like nobody understands them or where they have been. Even though I have been here in America for many years and do know a number of people who (at least sort of) understand me, it was refreshing to hear from others with similar life experiences. The eight of us were able to remind each other that we are not alone in what we have been through (both the good and the bad). It was an emotional time, though, as several choked up while describing painful separations from people they were close to, and the difficulties they faced in adjusting back to American culture when they returned from living overseas. Many in the audience came up to us afterward and mentioned how much they appreciated hearing the things we shared.

Now to backtrack a bit. The week before Floyd and I came to NY was really busy. School got out on Thursday (so sad to say goodbye to my students), and I spent Friday cleaning and packing up my classroom. Then we had less than a week to pack up everything we own and move it out of our apartment, not to mention clean the place from top to bottom. We would never have made it in time if not for the friends and relatives who came to help!

But the job was finally done the next Friday night, and we got up early Saturday morning to catch our 7:00 a.m. flight to Cleveland and then on to Buffalo. From there it was an hour and a half drive to Houghton.

One of the things we've enjoyed here at the conference is meeting some of our future co-workers from Morrison Academy, where we'll be working in Taiwan. Most are from Morrison's other campuses (there are four, counting a tiny satellite school, in different cities), but there are a couple who will be in Taichung with us, who have been there already. 

Some of our future coworkers have been able to tell us interesting things about Taiwan, like about the large flying cockroaches we can expect to encounter. Yikes! (I don't do well with big bugs.) Thinking of possible pets, I inquired half-jokingly whether there are any animals there that eat cockroaches. Alas, apparently the cockroaches' only real predators are gigantic (eight inch long) spiders. I wish I hadn't asked.

Another challenge we'll face when we get there will be learning the language. Although the school functions in English, we will need to learn some Mandarin Chinese to be able to shop in the local markets and basically do anything outside of school and home. I like languages, but Chinese, with its four tones and thousands of written characters, is starting to sound really daunting. A word can have totally different meanings depending on the tone of voice in which you say it, and any given sound can be written with several different characters depending on what it means in the sentence. Talk about confusing!

On the bright side, Taiwan does sound like a beautiful place to live, at least in some areas. Yes, there are lots of big cities with smog and crazy traffic, but there are also gorgeous mountain ranges, forests, beaches, and idyllic farmland. The island is far from being nothing but a manufacturing/exporting center, which is how I would have thought of it not so long ago.

Taiwan is also home to the world's tallest building, Taipei 101 (which, as you might guess, is 101 stories tall). Click here to see a picture of it.  To get a true idea of its size, note that the "low" buildings around it are actually skyscrapers in their own right!

Well, it's getting late and we have to get up early for the morning session, so I'd better close and call it a night.  We're looking forward to the rest of the orientation and to some sightseeing at Niagara Falls in the next few days!  Here's one last picture: Floyd and me dressed up for PFO's International Banquet.