Taipei - Day 4

Feet. Hurt. Alright, anyone who says being a tourist is easy is wrong. We've walked more here in four days than we have in, well, a long time back home. Maybe we are just pretty lazy back home, but that is beside the point. As a tourist, you are on your feet for the majority of the day. Add with that fatigue, jetlag, culture shock, a language barrier, and you have the makings of a pretty hard job! Well, alright, a quick update as to what we did today.

Since it was Sunday today we went to church with Dr. Chen. We left our place at 7:30am and walked to the church for the service at 7:45. The preaching was on a part from 1 Corinthians 8. The idea was this, "If don't eat, you suffer no loss, if you do eat, you gain nothing." There was also a hymn that we sang about letting God work in us. The leader of the hymn singing made the point, that if we are to worried about what happens to us, or just do not trust God, He can neveer work in our lives to a full extent becuase we will be to worried to hear God speak to us. I thought that point was a good one. How many times are Christians too worried about what happens on earth to actually listen to God and carry out the amazing things he wants to do with their lives? We sang a few hymns and got a royal welcome from the church. They sang the "Welcome" song. Dr. Chen said it was something that some one in the church had written. After the service, we went to go get some breakfast.

For breakfast we had some Chinese donuts (yo-tao, literally, oil stick), soybean milk (dou-jiang), and a flour and egg thing (shou-bing). A Chinese donut is bassically a long piece of dough that is fried. I guess it look something like a cheero, except without the cinnamon. Everything was very good. My dad used to have the donut and soybean milk as a breakfast quite often. The place we had breakfast had a pretty common setup. It is on the ground level of a six, or so, story building. Everything used to cook is in the front of the shop, all of the ovens, presses, milk wamers, refrigerators, and oil frying pans were there to draw you in I guess. If you walk past all of that, then you get to the little space behind (about 12x6) where you can sit down and eat. It was quite dirty, nothing like Taipei 101, but the food was still good! Eating in Taiwan is just as much about the atmosphere as the food... So, with breakfast out of the way, it was only 9:00am, so what better thing to do than to go back to the house and rest! (all that hard touristing, remember)

After a good amount of rest, we went to the National Palice Museum. It has a whole bunch of artifacts from all the time periods of China. From 6000b.c. to 1911. That was interesing for a little bit, but walking around seeing pots and jars gets kinda old. Plus, we were not alowed to take any pictures of the artifacts. We stayed for about an hour and a half and then went in search of food. We ended up at the night market again, the same one we went to last night (it is along the metro line we took). This time, instead of eating in the crazy hall, we just ate in a shop that was a few blocks from the main bit of action, and we were a little early for the dinner rush, so it was not crowded at all. From there though, we walked into the market is all of it's crazyness. It's hard to descibe the market in words. You have thousands of people around you, all talking, all trying to get somewhere. You are crammed into little side streets that are just big enough for one car to get through, and you have all the merchants trying to get you to buy something. It's pretty fun. We spent time just looking around, buying some more food, and trying not to get too lost. We left a little earlier than last night, I guess we learned our lesson. That was bassically out day. Tomorrow we are going to go Taroko Gorge. It will be a little road trip, about 3 hours. The gorge is basically Taiwan's Grand Canyon. There will be hot springs, and we will be driving around the coast.
-Aaron

By the way, I put some pictures of Katherine's hair cut thing on her post.

At the National Palace Museum

I don't know what this building is, but it was right next to the museum.

Part of the night market. This is the main street. There are other side streets that come off from this street.

One of those side streets.

Here is a quick video of the lined up scooters...

The crowd! Here is what one of the crowds looked like. I didn't really do a good job with the video, but it gives you an idea of the crowd.

Here is the place that we ate two days ago inside the "food court."