Up and Running!

Alright, I finally got it up and going thanks to my amazing sister Tricia. It's impossible to set up one of these blogs over here if you don't speak CHINESE!

I'll start from the beginning by adding the first email I sent out to everyone. Then I'll add new things in the coming days. This is exciting, I can finally be like all the cool kids and have a real blog. Here it goes (this was written on Monday):

So I just got to my elementary school a couple of hours ago. It's huge. There are like 2300 students here....twice the size of Franklin College. Grades 1-6. Everyone is super excited to have us here. The kids performed for us as soon as we got here. We went on a tour of the school, which is huge. There are four floors and a HUGE area for the kids to play in the middle. In between classes the kids have 10-15 minutes to play. That's nice for the teachers to get organized for the next class and for the kids to run off some of that extra energy. "Recess" is also not supervised, which is crazy to me.....but it works!

So we're living in an old church. It's really just a building, but it was used for a church. I know when I'm trying to find my way home to look for the cross on the front. (Thank goodness it's a Christian church, I feel a little safer at night sleeping under a cross than a big Buddha!) Downstairs is a baptism bath and an area for communion.....Erin thought it was a bar, haha! Upstairs is where we stay. There are these matresses for us to sleep on the floor. Kyle said it was nice for the prison to donate mattresses for us.....everyone is really chipping in! There're SUPER hard! But we can't complain cause it was so nice of everyone to set things up like they did for us. Before it was a church the upstairs was a dance studio. I totally called that the minute I walked in. There are hardwood floors and a whole wall is covered by a mirror. It reminded me of when I used to take ballet!

I was kind of glad to leave Taipei (the capital) which was where we stayed for the first 3 nights. The hotel was nice but the city was a little too overwhelming for me. They compared it to New York City and the noise and the lights definitely matched how I would imagine NYC to be. The pollution was also very bad. Many of the people actually walk around with face masks on. It's so weird seeing everything in Chinese. NO ONE else talks English casually so the only English I hear are from the members of our group. I definitely feel out of the loop. We stick out like a sore thumb not only because of our English speaking, but also because.....we're white, haha, and we don't have black hair. There really is no diversity here (except us). It kind of makes me realize what my English Language Learners must be going through.

We've visited a lot of places so far, especially for only being here a short amount of time. We've visited a couple of temples. Their temples are so interesting to me. There will be a statue of Buddha and then a statue of the God of the Ocean and then a statue of an important general all in the same area. Different people worship different Gods, but they all worship together in peace. This is why there has never been a religious war here in Taiwan.

Yesterday we went to a market. I definitely saw squid on a stick. Seafood is so big here and I'm just not so big on it. I've been working on my chopstick skills, but there is still room for improvement. We definitely had Pizza Hut last night....that's more my style :-)