Hiking in Taiwan

Tainan

A few weekends ago, Erin and I took of to Tainan, a city south of us. Erin has some friends there who were nice enough to show us around. It was probably the hottest day I had encountered thus far in Taiwan, but still enjoyable, even as we took a walking tour to see the sights in the heat of the day!
Above is a picture of an old rice warehouse that was overtaken by the roots of some kind of tree- I will have to look it up. Anyway it was a really fun place to go exploring! They also had a museum there with wax figures, and they looked very realistic.

This was at a fort build during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. In the ruins we are looking at the walls are actually pasted together with rice!

These are some stone tablets sitting on the backs of stone turtles. There were originally nine of them, but one fell in the ocean when they were unloading them. Many years later when they fished it out of the water(just recently), someone had an eye irritation and scooped water out of its back to flush it out. He was supposedly healed and the next thing you know the turtle was declared to have healing power and named a god. Crazy! It now has it's own temple and everything.

We were SUPER excited to see this fresh squeezed lemonade on that very hot day!

This is part of the first Confucius temple built in Taiwan. They have lots of ancient instruments and clothes in a viewing area on the side of the temple.

Part of a school where they would educate those who participated in rituals for the confucius celebrations.

Our very yummy lunch!!

I am so glad I was able to go and visit John and Marianne with Erin. They were awesome hosts!!!

Some of my cute kids!

Baby Kalen

I need to put some pics of my students, but here is another cute boy that I spend a lot of my time with. One of the secretaries lets me take him on the day I have the least amount of teaching hours. I even got to help her pick out his English name!!

Lukang!

Lukang is an old port city south of Fengyuan by a little over an hour. For the last day of our vacation we decided to go check it out. Kelly, Erica, Sunny, Brandon, Susan, Whitney and I had a lot of fun exploring the sites.

We had heard about the tiny alleys you have to 'squeeze' through when you pass others people. Some of them were pretty narrow!

A lot of past teachers have found this man to paint fans for them. We all decided to get the Taipei Temple and some cherry blossoms or bamboo. It was amazing to watch him work!

This was a super cute baby we found while walking around the Temple, Whitney used her awesome Chinese and hand gestures to ask if we could take a picture:)

Of course anywhere we go in Taiwan is sure to be an adventure with food. After the restaurant for lunch we continued on to enjoy fried squid on a stick, sweet potato chips, cow tongues (sweet pastries in a tongue shape), and ro mien bao(yummy bread with meat in the middle)

Camping in Dongshih

Our second day of vacation came up the first Monday in April. To take advantage of the three day weekend we decided to do some Taiwanese camping!! About an hour away from Fenyuan is a place called Dongshih- it was quite an adventure:)
It was kind of a windy road to get there, but very easy to set up. Most of the tent spots are even covered! There were endless trails to explore, but our first mission was dinner. All the supplies for our bbq came in a box, including the food! We had pork, chicken, corn, tofu, and rice sausages!
After we had cooked all our food we headed out to see the fireflies!! It was an incredible experience, like seeing stars right in front of you. When all our lights were off we might have been standing in the clouds!
Eventually we made it back to camp, and after a few hours of sleep headed over to a restaurant for some breakfast. We had more tofu of course, rice porridge, and eggs.
Exploring in the daytime we found many things we had missed in the dark the night before. We realized we had stumbled upon a huge playground! Not only was there a huge swinging area, but a rope climbing station, ziplining, sledding(on astroturf no less), a tight rope, and a huge trampoline!

I was with a few of the teachers, and some of our awesome secretaries and their friends. I still can't believe how lucky I am to be surrounded by these people. They made the weekend perfect!!

We stopped by another famous dumpling restaurant on the way home, and then rested up for our day trip to Lukang in the morning!!

Ershui

Ershui is a town my roomate discovered you can go and see monkeys at various times of the day. Erin, Brandon, and I decided to head up there one morning, and this is what we found!!
There were monkeys everywhere! We headed up a path, and on every side there were more. The road wound up into another mountain, with stairs of course. We headed up, looking for the temple we heard was at the top.
The path was pretty crowded, which we thought was a little weird considering how few people we had seen before then. At the top we discovered some kind of festival going on. The next thing we knew there was a procession lined up, complete with these super cool costumes of people twice as tall as normal! It was crazy. Only something you would see in Taiwan, that's for sure. The drums and interesting displays made for quite the adventure. We followed for a few minutes to see where they were going, and to our surprise there was a whole city behind the temple! I am constantly amazed at the use of space here.
After hanging out on the streets and grabbing a few snacks from various vendors, we headed back down the path to head to the train station. It was fun to see a few more monkeys:)
Thanks to Erin for showing me such a fun place!