I guess its time for another installment of Taiwan trippin'

Or something..well, I guess it has been about a week, so I should continue with the Taiwan pics. On our second day there Amy informed us that her son Abner would be happy to drive us around all day to see whatever we want since he didn't have class that day. We tried to say that he didn't need to do that...but resistance was futile. So we decided to go up and check out Danshui a well know port up on the coast. There was quite a bit of rain that day, so we might look kind of soggy. Ok, so my eyes are kinda closed in this picture, but it was the best shot I had of this bridge. This is the Qin ren qiao(if I knew how to type characters I would put them on here) or "valentines bridge". Not really sure why they call it that, but it was pretty.

The following two signs are for the restroom, but we thought they were funny/cute.Ben kept commenting on how good the ice cream looked, so we went and got him one. Abner thought it would be funny to buy the large one for Ben. They weren't kidding about it being large. It was mango flavored-pretty tasty too.We were going to go check out this historic site from when the Dutch colonized the island (which I didn't know had happened), but they were closed, so we checked out the big christian university nearby. Here we are by the giant sign.

We drove the long way home --in fact we taught Abner a new phrase, "scenic route", and got to see some more of the ocean. Yes, I'm looking really cool in this picture.I liked this picture cause this guy has this really long fishing pole (kinda hard to tell from the photo), but I really wish I had taken a picture of the sign right next to me that said no fishing. Ben and Abner being cool I guess. Uh I just like the color of the water in this one.

There was this neat land bridge along the side of the highway. Ben and I raced up the stairs on either side. I'm sure I won...

And right across the street was this temple.

An outing with the kids

Well, before I get back to Taiwan posts I think I'll throw in some pics of the kids. Today the last of our visitors from New York went back home-we'll miss you Aunt Katherin and Grandma. Somehow we managed to not take any pictures with them...but yesterday we got some fun ones of the kids at the arboretum.

Oh look, I did find one with Aunt Katy-Hunter is giving her a back massage.

So you want to know how our Taiwan trip was?

I'm pretty sure I heard this question from every person I talked to this week (well, maybe with the exception of the friendly workers at walmart). The trip was awesome...I guess I've just been too tired to blog about it. So thankful that Ben's mom and sister were here so that I could take like 3 hr naps every day to recover from jetlag (poor Ben didn't get to do that, we made him go straight back to work, hehehe). It was so fun to be able to go back and to share that part of my life with Ben. After 20++ hours of travel (flying over both Alaska and Siberia for some strange reason) we finally landed in Taiwan.

See, this is Alaska from the plane window...

We spent the first 6 dayswith my friend Amy, her husband and their boys Abner (yes, I told him I've never met someone named this) and Nick. We had so much fun with them it was hard to leave. We had fun teaching them to play Uno and Phase Ten and forcing them to use English during the game. They spoiled us too much and made us some incredible food and I was grateful that Amy even showed me how to make some of it.

Playing Uno with the boys

On our first day we went up to a place called Jiufen. It's a ways out of the city up some seroiusly winding roads in the mountains. It is beautiful up there and there's lots of shops and places to eat and you can see the ocean.Here's Ben braving his first 'hong dou tang with yuyuan'-red bean soup with chewy taro ball things. I love it.

So I'm not even through the first day and this blog is already longer than most. Well, next we went to visit the town where Amy grew up. It is called Pingxi and is famous for the sky lantern festival. The town is really small and much less modern than other places, but they have tons of shops where you can create your own paper lantern with your wishes written on it to send off into the sky (I'm thinking sending a 4 ft hot air balloon up into the sky to fall who knows where wouldn't be legal here). They looked really neat but we forgot to make one cause it was so rainy. We did ride the old train down the our next destination though.

Amy and me waiting for the train

Amy and Mr. Xue-they were so cute always laughing and linking arms and teasing eachother-unlike most other couples we saw there.

I feel like for some reason Taiwan has an inordinate number of suspension bridges. They look beautiful but can be a bit creepy.

We were going to go to this place with lots of history and supposedly the largest waterfall in Taiwan (or maybe it was all of Asia...I can't recall)-but it turns out it is closed because of some dispute with the government about who owns the natural resources foudn there. It was really pretty though.

We crouched down and took a picture of the waterfall-which was really quite impressive-through the trees and fence

Ok, I think I mostly made it through day one...more to come (I hope this doesn't turn into a 9 part series...)