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...)