DID YOU KNOW...

...pineapples DON’T grow on trees?!? We didn’t know that. We really should have, but we didn’t! Apparently a lot of Americans have that misconception. (Or, maybe they just told us that so we wouldn’t feel so stupid! :)

...water chestnuts can look like the picture below before they are dug out of their skin/shell, cut up and put into frozen Chinese stir-fry mixes!?! :) People here steam water chestnuts and eat them right from the skin/shell. They’re kind of tricky to eat. You have to bite them pretty hard to crack them in half. Then, you use the little horn from one half to dig out the insides of the other half. They taste very different from the ones we were used to eating in stir-fry back at home.

SUN MOON LAKE

(As you can see, we found a new, much easier way to display our pictures!)

In celebration of Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year, we spent the weekend of February 13th and 14th at a beautiful, nearby tourist destination, Sun Moon Lake. This was our first time traveling to this destination. The first day we were there it was very gray and foggy. The next day it cleared up beautifully, though!

We spent our time at the lake going on some walks, taking boat rides, riding the lake's brand new cable car and visiting the Formosan Aboriginal Cultural Village. This cultural village was interesting. Along with it being an exhibit venue for Taiwan's main aboriginal tribes, it was also an amusement park. :) We were lucky enough to be able to visit during cherry blossom season. So, all the cherry blossom trees were in bloom...it was beautiful!

The Sun Moon Lake area is truly one of Taiwan's national treasures!

SIX WEEKS OF WINTER

On December 22nd, the Taiwanese celebrated the winter solstice. We were told this marked the beginning of the winter season. And then, just last week, someone told us it was a special day because it marked the beginning of spring. So, apparently the winter season in Taiwan only lasts a little over six weeks...similar to the winter season in Minnesota! :)

COUPLETS

Spring couplets are something we started seeing around about one month ago. They're a red paper decoration put up every year around Chinese New Year. From what we understand, people put them up to scare away evil and to attract and express good fortune for the coming year. Below you'll see some couplets put up by our neighbors.



Debbie and Erica are two friends of ours in Douliu. Both of them are seniors in the college here and are earning their degrees in English. They were kind enough to get us some spring couplets to decorate the entrance to our apartment.

(Debbie)

If you're interested, the following websites will provide you with some interesting facts on couplets and some other tidbits about Chinese New Year.

http://www.herongyang.com/chinese/festivals/new_year.html

http://www.sinica.edu.tw/tit/festivals/0297_NewYear.html

SUPER BOWL MONDAY

Being 14 hours ahead of U.S. Central Time I (Phil) was unable to watch the Super Bowl live. I decided my next best option was to buy a Super Bowl package from iTunes. It included highlights from the Pro Bowl, the Super Bowl in its entirety, and Super Bowl highlights. So, instead of Super Bowl Sunday I decided to have Super Bowl Monday Night. It’s not as catchy, but it was the earliest I could watch the game.

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In order to keep the experience authentic I avoided anything that could’ve possibly told me who won. In an attempt to support my mission, Annalicia also avoided seeing the results of the game so that she couldn’t possibly give it away. For me this meant no looking at ESPN.com, Facebook, or other web-surfing at school on Monday. For her it meant just another regular day. :) It was a lot harder than I thought it would be to stay off of ESPN.com, but I did it (and was very productive I might add...possible life lesson).

As soon as I got home from school I checked to see if the game was ready to be downloaded, but only the highlights were available. I went for a half hour run, came back and checked to see if it was available yet. Not yet. I ran some errands and got a few snacks (mainly American Doritos) and came back. The game was still not available to be downloaded. While I was gone Annalicia did her best to help create an authentic Super Bowl party atmosphere by preparing a bunch of “cute snackies” (her words, not mine).

I must’ve misread the description of the Super Bowl package I purchased because the entire game was never available to download. I was a little bummed, but Annalicia said we could try finding it somewhere else. The only problem with that idea was that then we would know who won because any website related to the Super Bowl was going to have the score posted as big as possible. Well, we determined that Annalicia would try and find something because she was not as invested in the authentic Super Bowl experience as I was. It didn’t really matter because we couldn’t find any site that we could download the game from.

My attempt to make the Super Bowl experience authentic failed. We watched the 10 minutes of highlights, with Annalicia already knowing who won (it bugged me more than it should have) and 10 minutes of post-game celebrations while eating our “cute snackies”. I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining because after all I did just have a “Super Bowl Party” in Taiwan, it was just completely different than what I was used to.

Note: Tuesday at 1:43 pm iTunes sent me an email telling me that “the Super Bowl in its entirety is available to be downloaded”…great, thanks iTunes! :)

OUR WINTER BREAK TRIP

After our winter in-service we took some vacation days in order to have some time to do some traveling in northern Taiwan and down the east coast of the island. These were places we hadn’t done a lot of/any traveling in prior to this trip because these places all take a significant amount of time to get to from Douliu and we only had weekend time frames to work with in the past.

Our in-service got done on a Friday (January 22^nd) at noon. Straight from our in-service we headed to Taipei. We decided to stay in a traveler’s hostel on Friday night. The owner likes to take pictures of her guest. So, when we checked in on Friday afternoon, she snapped this one of us. :)

We spent the afternoon hanging out with other foreign English teachers at the Taipei Zoo. I (Annalicia) haven’t been to a ton of zoos in my lifetime, but the Taipei Zoo is now definitely at the top of my zoo list!

(The Taipei Zoo is one of a limited number of zoos in the world to house Pandas.)

(Being from Minnesota, we thought it was funny they had raccoons on exhibit.)

We had fun spending time with our “foreign friends” that night as well!

The next day we went to the National Palace Museum in Taipei. This is one of the most famous museums for ancient Chinese artifacts. In fact, it has the largest permanent collection of Chinese artifacts (650,000 pieces) in the world. The artifacts in this museum are of the same roots as the artifacts in the Palace Museum, which is located in the Forbidden City in China.

The reason the artifacts in the National Palace Museum didn’t stay in China was because of the Chinese Civil War (which started in 1927). The war caused people to be concerned for the safety of these artifacts, so a decision was made to move them to Taiwan. And, I guess they were never returned. We were not allowed to take pictures inside the museum, but here's one of the outside.

From there, we went to The Grand Hotel (also located in Taipei). The Grand Hotel was established in 1952 and has become a token destination in Taiwan. We were told multiple times, by different people, that we had to stay there before we went back to the States. So, we did! It was a beautiful and very unique hotel!

The next day we left Taipei and went to a small area about 45 minutes away called Wulai. Wulai is known for waterfalls and hot springs. In order to get to our final destination in Wulai, we had to utilize all different forms of transportation: a shuttle bus, Taipei’s MRT, a regular bus, walking, a tiny tourist train and finally, a cable car.

The cable car went right past Wulai Waterfall and brought us to our hotel, “Dreamland Resort”. This place was really beautiful! It covered a large area near the top of a mountain. Streams and small waterfalls were abundant there! We were also lucky enough to be able to catch an aboriginal dancing show right when we got there!

(Wulai Waterfall)

From Wulai we headed to Hualien county on the east coast of Taiwan. We spent all of our time in Hualien hiking in Taroko Gorge. This place was breathtaking!

Shakadang Trail

Tunnel of Nine Turns

At this particular trail we were given helmets to wear in case of falling rocks. Phil and I took this safety precaution lightly...for some reason we didn't think there was any real threat. Well, after we got back, we found out that a few days after we were at this trail, a woman died after a rock fell from the mountainside and hit her on the head (she had just dropped off her helmet and was walking to her tour bus). After hearing this news, we felt a little foolish...to say the least.

This trail was really cool. It swerved through the mountainside, alongside the river. It was a great place to see the marble walls of the gorge.

Swallow Grato Trail

Eternal Spring Shrine Trail

The shrine pictured below was built in honor of the people who died in the process of building roads and bridges inside the gorge. (A temple is built in honor of a god and a shrine is built in honor of people who have died.) This particular trail led us to four different temples/shrines.

To get to the last temple on this trail, we had to cross a suspension bridge. Prior to stepping on the bridge I was acting pretty tough...even though I'd never crossed a suspension bridge before, I didn't think I'd have any trouble. Well, I was wrong. I got to the middle and froze. I started yelling things to Phil, but at the time I had no idea what I was saying.

After we got across, he told me I yelled, "I don't want to do this!" That wasn't the most sane statement I could make in the middle of the bridge...I maybe should have decided that at the beginning, but in the middle? Apparently I thought I had options. :) I made myself go across the bridge two more times after that. Those crossing went much smoother.

The temple we got to after crossing the bridge seemed more similar to Chinese temples than most of the temples we have seen so far in Taiwan. One thing that was very different from most temples we've seen here is there were monks there...this isn't super common in Taiwan. Another interesting this about this temple was that the statue gods were HUGE!!!

Traffic in Taroko Gorge is not super safe, in our opinion...we definitely went on the scariest 15 minute taxi ride of our lives there. In the following picture you’ll see an example of one reason why this is the case. If you look closely, you’ll see that the road goes from two lanes down to one lane in the tunnel.

After Taroko Gorge, we were planning on traveling to Yushan National Park. As we were attempting to get there, however, we found out that roads to the park were still closed as a result of Typhoon Morakot. So, we unexpectedly ended up spending a few hours in some small towns on the east coast (waiting for trains).

Below you’ll see a picture of the town of Yuli. As we were hanging out by the fountain in Yuli, we had a kind woman, who looked about our age and who spoke very good English, stop and ask if we needed a ride anywhere. I’m not sure if she was just that nice or if we just looked that bad after living out of our backpacks for so many days. :) People in Taiwan are generally so kind and helpful!

As we were walking from the fountain in Yuli back to the train station, we had a police officer stop us on his scooter. This had never happened before, so we were a little concerned. The man didn’t speak any English, but we soon found out that all he wanted to do was take a picture for us in front of the train station. :)

We were able to see some pretty great scenery from the train that day...

Instead of going to Yushan National Park, we ended up taking the train back around to the west side of the island and we spent the night in the city of Pingdong. The next morning we took a taxi to a tiny village about 45 minutes away from Pingdong, called Maolin. Below you will see some pictures of the scenery between Pingdong and Maolin...the area is beautiful!

The Maolin area was another place hit hard by Typhoon Morakot. Many of the roads we were on near Maolin were makeshifts ones, located in dried up riverbeds. On our ride to Maolin, along with seeing many damaged roads, we also saw collapsed bridges and even a few buildings and houses still in the riverbed after being washed away by mudslides caused by Typhoon Morakot in August.

Once the taxi driver dropped us off in Maolin, we had about two hours to explore...we had made an agreement with our taxi driver (with the help of a random high school girl translating) that he would wait for us for two hours so we had a way back to Pingdong.

Maolin is not only known for its beautiful landscape, it is also the spot where Taiwan’s purple butterflies migrate in the winter. We’ve been told this is one of the largest butterfly migration spots in the world, second only to the Monarchs’ migration spot in Mexico.

(One type of Taiwan's purple butterfly)

Our expectations of this place were a little off, however. Upon arriving in Maolin we were in search of the Purple Butterfly Valley. We walked vigorously up a mountain path from 8:15 until 9:45 am hoping to find this place. We honestly thought we were going

to turn a corner and look down at a valley of butterflies. This never happened, though, and by 9:45 am Phil wisely decided we needed to turn around, to get back to our taxi on time (I wanted to keep going).

Now, on the way up the mountain path there were definitely butterflies to be seen, but on the way down they were EVERYWHERE! We found out that the butterflies don’t usually wake up until late morning, when the sun rises over the mountains. As we were walking down the path, we realized that Purple Butterfly Valley was not something we had to find, we were in the valley the entire time, we just didn’t know it because all the butterflies were sleeping! My disappointment turned to thrill! It was so fun to be amongst so many butterflies in such a beautiful area! (There were many different kinds of butterflies, not just purples ones.)

(The tiny village of Maolin)

Butterflies can be really hard to capture in a picture. Videos work a little better...

Maolin was our final destination on our travels around the island. After the taxi brought us back to Pingdong, we took the train back to Douliu. Our adventures weren’t quite over yet, though. (They never really are in Taiwan!) :)

We arrived in Douliu pretty exhausted, quite ready to be home. Once we got out of the train station we looked for our bikes, but they were no where to be seen. So, we both let out a big sigh and headed back into the station. We went to the Visitors Center and were lucky enough to find a woman who spoke some English.

After a few minutes of confusion (she thought we wanted to rent a bike), she understood our problem and dropped everything she was doing to help us out. She brought us to the police department and we found out our bikes had been “towed” (they were sitting there too long, I guess). So, she brought us to the towing area on the other side of town and convinced the guys working there we didn’t have to pay a fee.

Before we left, she told us, “We have to take a picture.” We thought this picture was going to be just of our bikes for documentation purposes, but we were wrong. The woman gave her camera to the guys working and they snapped a pictures of all three of us. :) It was a great end to a great trip!

Happy Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year!!!