It's been a few weeks since I've posted anything but I've been busy. Kelly was in Taiwan visiting me for the last week or so. She left last night and now I'm definitely experiencing some post-trip blues. But I'm not here to tell you about that. I'm here to tell you that our trip started with Kelly coming to Principal for the day to meet some kids. They had a lot of fun with her there, even though they mostly just stared and were confused by her presence. The highlight was when she sat to Catherine, a 5 year old girl, who spoke Chinese to her the whole class. That was pretty funny and cute. She had food on her face and everything. That night, we went out to sushi with all the other teachers from my school. Good eats!
The next day, we went to yoga which happened to start that day with like 30 minutes of dancing which was pretty fun and goofy. After, we got lunch with little Brian and his family. Afterwards, they took us to Taipei 101 and we went to the top. We also went to Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei which was pretty striking. There was a large festival of some sort going on there with a huge parade which was a lot of fun to see!
That night, we hopped on a turbo-prop plane and headed for the Peng Hu islands, which is an archipelago off the west coast of Taiwan. The flight was only about 50 minutes long. Once we arrived, we stood out front of the airport waiting for out pick-up from the "Dream Homestay". After about 15 minutes of wondering if anyone was actually showing up, a van pulled up and a woman ran out with the name Ryan scrawled on a lid from lunch box. We nodded that we were indeed the only foreigners on the whole island and they rushed us off to their home. I had been expecting to go to a big hotel, but that's the moment that I found out what "homestay" means. The owners names were Ken and May and they were really nice and accommodating. We stayed in their house that had 5 guest rooms total, although no one else was staying there when we were. We went to a little restaurant nearby that night where we had fried rice and a whole fish that was cut into pieces and floating around in soup.
The next morning, we were driven to the local pier, where we hopped on a boat for an all-day boat tour of the surrounding islands. This was a lot of fun although we were definitely ready to get off the boat by the end of it. We toured Chimei island, and we were supposed to rent a scooter and cruise around. However, we thought we'd be able to handle the challenge of driving a scooter, but after failing to make it out of the parking lot, we were told to get on the tour bus with everyone else. We also toured Wangan island, and two others I can't remember the name of. One thing that was strange that both Kelly and I noticed was how mellow the islands were. We hardly saw anyone the entire time. Not sure what everyone does there...
The next day, we spent lounging around on the beach basically all day, as well as biking around for a few hours. This was a lot of fun. Check the pics! The next phase of our Taiwanese adventure was going to Tainan, which is on the southwest coast of Taiwan. The plan had originally been to go to Haulien and visit Taroko Gorge, which is one of Taiwan's premier travel destinations, but an impending typhoon changed our plans. We had the pleasure of taking the high-speed train to Tainan which was a lot of fun. We were actually both a little nauseous initially because of how fast it went. It covers the entire length of the island in about 90 minutes. In Tainan, we stayed in a really nice hotel and checked out some of the local temples and what-not. I feel like that pretty much sums up that last week. It was a whirlwind but we had a great time and got to see a lot of Taiwan. I'll post pics soon. Ta ta for now!
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