Anyways, Spencer's brother Kyle was in Japan at that time doing a teaching/internship thing, so we all planned to meet up in Taiwan on our way back home.
If I remember correctly, Kyle's Japan visa required him to leave the country and re-enter, so he bought his ticket to Taiwan and arranged a 72 hr layover in shanghai on the way there. I moved back to wuhan about a week before the trip (leaving behind my poor tomato plants.. sniff sniff), and on Thursday spencer was all packed and moved out of his place in nanjing and went to shanghai to meet Kyle and show him around china a little (if shanghai even counts as REAL china).
Here's how Thursday went:
I sleep in, get up around 10. Check my email and stuff around 11. There is a frantic message from Kyle saying he is stuck in the airport in Japan, they won't let him get on the plane because he doesn't have a tourist visa for china. His plane is supposed to leave at like 12 or something.
I replied saying "get on that plane," and called spencer who was in shanghai about to go pick kyle up from the airport. We researched it before hand, there is a new law in china that if you fly into shanghai or Beijing you can leave the airport and have 72 hours as a free tourist (no $130 visa needed) IF your flight is a layover/connecting flight. We purposefully got him a two day layover through shanghai. And it was expensive and a hassle to change and get so he REALLY needed to make this flight.
Kyle called me through skype from his smart phone and I was like "go talk to them again, they have to let you on!" So he looked up the law on his phone and showed it to the people at the desk, and with about 30 min before the plane was supposed to take off, they said okay and let Kyle check in. LUCKILY (as happened many times on this trip) the plane was delayed and he ended up having plenty of time to catch his flight.
Welcome to China. Where with a little persistence and a lot of patience, anything is possible.
When Kyle got to shanghai he got ready to go through customs but didn't have the address of the hostel spencer had reserved for them. So after a little panicking, a worker had to walk with Kyle out to the exit to find spencer and get the address. lol! At least they let him through! They spent Thursday and Friday seeing Shanghai. Spencer will have to post pictures and stuff of that.
Then Friday I left for Taiwan from the wuhan airport. There is a direct flight from wuhan to Taiwan. Woohoo. Two fifty pound bags and a couple of carry-ons. No fun.
The number one difference between China and Taiwan is THE SKY. I spent probably two hours, just looking at the sky. Because there is one in Taiwan.
I got there friday night, took a bus from the airport to the taipei main station, and checked my bags at the luggage storage building/warehouse around the block. For a couple of dollars a day, they will store you big luggage for you while you travel the island. Then I went by subway to my hostel and checked in. I hadn't eaten yet, so ran back out for my first meal back in Taiwan: 7-11 hotdog and mugua niunai. Mmm mmmm.
My hostel was about a fifteen minute walk from the temple, so I planned to meet up with one of my old companions Zheng Jing and do a session with her. I overslept the next day, couldn't get ahold of her, and made it to the session after the one I set up to be there for. She wasn't there :( but I did see another sister from my mission who is a temple worker there now.
It had been a year since I had been able to attend the temple! The chinese version is the best. After it was over, I got a duck biandang nearby, and still had some time to kill before meeting up with spencer and Kyle at the taipei main station, but there wasn't much to do so I just hung around the stake center for an extra hour or so. It started to rain hard core so I bought an umbrella at the local 7.
After it let up a bit, I made it to the station, bought our high speed rail tickets for later, and waited for them to arrive by bus. Sad- there was an old man that got off one of the buses and it was raining and an attendant/bus driver guy helped him get off and get his luggage from beneath and brought him over to where I was sitting under the overhang. He started talking to me (in English) and it became apparent very quickly that this man had Alzheimer's, and his pants were wet with urine, and his luggage was a rollie-backpack with a pink little girl's backpack tied to it with a luggage strap. Both of them were soaked through and the backpack was being dragged on the floor behind the suitcase. It had his name and address taped to it in huge writing though, so that was good. He was coming from L.A.
Anyways, he started talking to me and asking me if it was my backpack that was attached to the suitcase. I said no, and he said that there was treasure and gold inside. Okay. And then he remembered it was actually his. Anyways, it was sad, I later saw a traffic person leading him by the arm towards another bus/taxi or something. I hope he made it wherever he was going okay.
ANYWAYS, spencer and Kyle finally got there and it was awesome and we checked Spencer's two suitcases, and stashed the rest of our luggage in a pay by the hour type cubby at the train station, and then we headed to the 101 building to show Kyle. It was fun and awesome to finally be there, together, without any more problems. lol.
Then we ran over (by subway) to the shilin night market for some dinner.
They don't look very happy in this picture. Maybe because they were eating dog meat on a stick. Or maybe because me and spencer ordered stinky tofu and made Kyle try some and he said "it's not bad" so we ordered more. Hahaha. And Kyle almost died. We thought he liked it! He doesn't. Good thing we still do. I need to get the pictures from Kyle.
We ate stinky tofu, drank lots of papaya milk, winter melon milk tea, meat sticks, I think spencer and Kyle tried an oyster omelet (disgusting), stinky tofu, doughnuts, and just about anything else that looked good. By the end of the night Kyle was pleading for a restroom and we had to literally run back to the subway station before he exploded all over the street. Probably a combination of the shanghai china food the day before, and the weird Taiwanese stuff we ate that night. Gross!
We then travelled back to the main station, picked up our stuff from the locker, and boarded the high speed train down to gaoxiong.
Gaoxiong is AWESOME! I'm so glad we went down there. It took under two hours to get down there from taipei. We watched "Little Fockers" on my ipad and laughed obnoxiously on the silent train on the way down while everyone was probably trying to sleep. Haha. Whatever, the lights were on. We took a taxi from the new HSR station in zuoying (my birthplace! And my dads death place!) to our hostel which was literally a ONE MINUTE walk to the chapel. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting a cheap and awesome stay in gaoxiong.
Gaoxiong Bike Hostel. In zuoying. highest reviews of any hostel I've ever stayed at. http://www.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/Bike-Kaohsiung-Hostel/Kaohsiung/67368
The next day was Sunday and we went to sacrament meeting with the ward that was the first ward I served in. It was cool to see so many old faces, and to see how much the ward has grown in two years! My friend from the mission Dillon Chen came to meet up too for sacrament meeting. It was awesome. Lots of old friends.
We skipped out on the other two hours and rented bikes and I took spencer and Kyle around zuoying. Gaoxiong bike rentals are so cool. Free bikes! We went to lotus lake, then got some famous niuroumian at a shop down the street. I had been there before, my first authentic niuroumian on the island. Huge bowls of soup. So good.
We stuffed our selves, and then rode back through the neighborhoods my investigators and new members used to live in- a huge neighborhood had been TORN DOWN! I couldn't believe it. I had planned to take them there and now it doesn't exist. Sad. Impossible to show them what my mission in that area was really like, what all my memories are really like. The super narrow and winding back roads with low brick walls and sharp corners that you almost slide out on your bike going around, the old city wall with the park in the middle, the heart of old zuoying! We went to the old army neighborhood that they turned into am art street and it was CLOSED! Sad. We still went in. Noone really cared i guess. I found my name I had written along with a million others 2.5 years previous. It was kind of cool.
Then we made a quick ride by where I met Joyce. It's weird to revisit a place like that.
"You can always revisit a place, but you can't go back in time."
It was hot and we got fried on that awesome bike ride.
We returned our bikes and then stopped for some mango bing! Best part of Taiwan. My favorite bing place was on the other side of the hostel. We seriously scored big with that hostel.
The hostel helped arrange a private car/shuttle bus thing for us down to kending that was roughly the same price as the bus, and it picked us up from the hostel and dropped us off at our hostel down in kending. Sweet. So Sunday afternoon we headed down to kending.
Breakfast at the kending hostel the next morning. Then we hopped on a bus and headed down to the BEACH! The highlight of my whole year.
We made some new friends (they were all over Kyle).
And got really burned.
After the beach we hopped back on the bus and got off at the furthest tip of Taiwan, there is a light house there and some great views and little hikes. So worth it.
There are a lot more pictures, I'll put them up later. When we were done, we got back on the bus and headed back to hengchun.
We headed back to zuoying by bus that night. Sad we only got to spend one day in kending. Next time I go I'm staying a week.
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