Just a quick good night

2:44 am here and I for one am ready to sleep.  In a few hours I will make a tour of the hotel.  For now love ya all and night night- Heather

At the airport and having some lunch.  I will post when we reach Singapore but that won't be until 1ish tomorrow afternoon.  Traveling mercies and more from us soon.-  heather

Dusting off the blog for some awesomeness

Just dusting off this ole blog for some upcoming travel.

Getting ready to head home

We have had a great trip, but now we're about ready to head home. We fly out tomorrow (Monday) morning, going to Detroit via Tokyo.

Yesterday was a rainy day, especially in the afternoon. While I was in class, Mom had planned to go on a tour to Chiufen Village, but it was raining so hard that she decided to cancel, so she just wandered around took some photos when the rain stopped. Class went well, and when I got back to the hotel, we decided to just walk a little bit around our hotel, and then had some dinner at TGI Friday's. It was a nice slow day.

Today was the final day of class. We went through the remaining material for our class, and the students had group presentations to give. It is always interesting to see how the different groups take on the assigned task and reach very different conclusions about how best to take on the assignment.  Just as one of the groups was about to start their presentation, we heard what sounded like a parade going on outside. There was actually a protest going down the street, though the protest march was, essentially, a marching band parade. There were drums and other instruments, marching in ranks down two lanes of the street, while traffic continued on the remaining lanes.  The protesters were Falun Gong members. Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline rooted in Buddhism with some Taoist principles, and it is banned in mainland China, and practitioners are heavily persecuted there. I have seen various protests by Falun Gong members here before, but this was the first one with a band. It was pretty large, with what seemed to be a couple of hundred members.

We wrapped up class, and the students had invited me and Mom to join them at their post-last-day-of-class meal. They chose a very traditional Taiwanese restaurant, and ordered a fixed menu of a tremendous amount of food. They described it as the sort of meal that you might have had 30 years ago in a small village to celebrate some good fortune. I lost count when we reached eight different dishes brought to the table, but I do remember fish, beef ribs, squid, mussels, scallops, chicken, pork, cabbage soup, crab, and at least a few other things. It was excellent all around, and I left plenty full, that's for sure.

Mom and I came on back to the hotel, and we're all packed. The alarm is set for 5:45am, and the car will pick us up at 6:45am. We missed doing some of the things we were hoping to do while we were here, due to the rain, but we got to do a lot of things, too.  The Maokong Gondola was really cool, and we really enjoyed the National Palace Museum. Going with Mom to the outdoor observation deck on the 91st floor of Taipei 101 was really fun, and the whole trip has just been a pleasure. Hanging out with Mom has been the best part, of course, and introducing her to a part of the world she's never seen before. It's been a good trip.

The Maokong Gondola, and rain, and a blog post from Mom

(This post was written by Mom, and typed  by Marcus, with a few editorial comments thrown in.)

Starting off our gondola ride

Looking out over Taipei

Taipei 101 towers over everything.

Our outing today was to the Maokong Gondola, one of the few "tourist" places that Marcus had not already been. We boarded the MRT at our usual subway station (I am getting a little better about which train to board to get where I want to be!), and road to the end of the brown line, which is the station for the Taipei Zoo, as well as for the gondola. We opted for the highest station on the gondola ride (which takes you up about 300 meters over the course of the trip), and really enjoyed the beauty all around us as we climbed higher and higher into the sky. [MWD: I kept saying "This is soo cool!]  Each of the cars would probably hold six people and feel quite stable and secure.

The picture doesn't do this justice.

Sanxuan Temple, where we waited for a break in the rain

When we reached the top, we started of on a little exploration -- and then those fluffy, fast-moving clouds that we had enjoyed going up the mountain turned into angry black thunderclouds full of heavy rain and lightning. At that point, most of the exploring was over, the gondola was closed [MWD: Cool as it was, I would not want to be up there in high wind and heavy rain.], and after waiting out the rain for quite a while in a small local temple, we joined the very long line sitting and waiting for a bus to take us back to the zoo subway station at the bottom of the mountain. I don't know whether it was the gray hair ("honor your elders") or the round eyes, but somehow we were jumped to the front of the line and gratefully hopped on the bus. [MWD: Mom made friends with a little girl sitting on her mother's lap on the bus on the way down the mountain -- the mother said "She would like to ask you where you are from", and then encouraged the little girl to ask. She was probably 4 years old, I would guess, and they seemed to have quite a nice little chat on the way down the windy mountain road.]  I really don't think God left us on that big airplane for 18 hours getting us to Taiwan just to spill us out on a gondola on the mountain, but returning to terra firma felt pretty good. Another good day.

The mist rolled in, and everything was hidden.

MWD: We had thought about going to a baseball game tonight, but the rain is continuing, and so that may not be our best choice. The same for our thoughts of going to Danshui to sit and look at the water. We still have another night or two, and if the rain does let up, maybe we'll hit the local night market tonight.

Last thing -- while Mom may not yet recognize any Chinese characters, this symbol is one she has come to recognize quickly.

The Paper Museum

Mom at the MRT station entrance

As we do pretty much every time we head off somewhere by MRT, we headed to the Nanjing East Road station, and that's what we did this morning.

I've been to the SuHo Paper Museum before, but it is a neat place, and Mom wanted to go, so off we went. We had been given instructions on how to get there by subway (MRT), but learned as we went that the instructions were wrong -- we were told to go to the wrong subway station! Thankfully, we were only one station away from the right one, and we figured that out before we had left the trains, so we were able to just get back on the new train and go to the right place.

Mom making her perfect sheet of paper

Me making my deformed sheet of paper

The Paper Museum is fairly small, but the artwork in paper shown inside, along with the information about the history of paper-making, make it a wonderful place to visit.It is really educational, but also takes a light-hearted approach to much of what it displays and how it educates.  It is a popular place for school groups, as we saw today, and we were glad that we were able to make our own sheet of paper before the HUGE school group came in a few minutes later. It was fun to watch them, though, and to see the similarities and differences between a group of Chinese schoolchildren and what a group of American schoolchildren would have been like.

There is a paper store almost next door to the museum, and between the two places, we found some really wonderful things to bring home. Thankfully, they are generally flat and light, so everything should fit in the suitcase!

This evening, I had class again, and it went smoothly. Tomorrow is up in the air for us -- depending largely on the weather. Hopefully we will be able to go to ride the Maokong Gondola to see some of the teahouses up on the mountain, and then to either catch a baseball game or go to Danshui, but for now, we just don't know. We'll be sure to let you know what we end up doing, though!

I lied to Mom tonight

Yesterday when we went to Din Tai Fung, the famous Taiwanese dumpling restaurant, Mom wasn't feeling so well, and so she didn't have anything to eat. That was a shame, and today, she was feeling fine and we decided to head back to the same restaurant. She had said that maybe she'd need to have a fork to eat there, and I told her that we'd be sure to get her one.
The wait was a little longer than we had expected, but then suddenly it was our turn, and we were happily seated. We ordered shrimp fried rice and some spicy noodles, and then an order of the original dumpling recipe, and an order of steamed shrimp and pork dumplings. I encouraged Mom to go ahead and give the chopsticks a shot, and she did great! I had, of course, never intended to get her a fork -- I knew that once she tried with the chopsticks and spoon, all would be well. She learned to mix some soy sauce and vinegar in with the shredded ginger in a small dish on the table, and then to pick up a dumpling in the chopsticks, dip it in the ginger and soy sauce/vinegar mix, put the dumpling into your spoon and poke a hole in the dumpling with a chopstick to let the broth inside out so that it can cool, and then taste that delicious dumpling that was totally worth the wait!