Taipei for the Weekend

It's been nice this last week. It rained a few times, and was rather cloudy. I love it when it rains! Why? Because it's not as hot. One night Kim and I were biking to a grocery store. When we came out it was pouring. A man we had never met before came up and gave us these ponchos. It was very nice of him.

This weekend I went to Taipei with the Chu Family. We took a two hour train ride. It was pretty amazing actually. Saturday, I took a taxi, train, bus, and the Metro (called MRT). It may not seem that amazing, but I had never taken that many forms of public transportation in one day. We went to the Taipei temple. It was crowded, and small, but everyone was very happy.  

After the temple trip, we went to a museum that taught all about one painting that is about 1,000 years old from the Song Dynasty. It explained a lot about their way of life. This is a picture of me with Greg and Grace Chu. They took turns translating what stuff said so I could learn about it too. 

There was an entire wall made into a copy of the painting. They made it so the people in the painting moved around. It was pretty cool.

This is me and Grace and a model of the type of bridge that was in the painting. In the painting there were pictures of several people carrying a box. It was their taxi. Greg asked me if the US had similiar things. All I could think of were carriages, but that's because the USA has only been around for a few hundred years, not a few thousand.

After the museum, we went to a wedding! It was different from any other wedding reception I've been too. Instead of forming a line, the bride and groom would come out during certain times during the night. The bride changed into three different dresses. They still had sometime similiar to the bouquet toss. What I thought was pretty cool is towards the end of the banquet, the bride and groom and their family came around to each table and gave a toast to everybody. There were 12 courses in the banquet, and most of the food I had never even heard of before.

At the end they gave out gifts of rice. So instead of throwing rice, they want you to take it home and eat it.



It was quite the adventure in Taipei. Sunday we went to an english speaking ward. Lately, I've just accepted that everything here in Taiwan is kind of different, but going to the english ward threw me off a little bit. It was so similiar to what it's like in Utah I felt like I was having backwards culture shock.