Taiwan--A Thanksgiving Trip

 We took a quick trip to Taiwan over Thanksgiving break.  Here is a quick photo sneeze.  My blog has been so lonely lately so I'm going to try to crank this out. (I've got WAY too many drafts on my dashboard that may never seen publication 😟, but such is life). So here we go with pictures not in any particular order (in other words, this is not a very connected, smooth read, but it is what it is!)

First off:  interesting things we saw:

This is a common scene in China on e-bikes, which are slower than motorcycles, but this was astounding to see.  Apparently it is illegal.  The baby did have a mask on....

Taiwan has interesting vehicles too.

This year's must-have fashions?

It's hard to tell what this picture is.  This taxi driver has every tinkly-noise-making trinket ever known to man sneezed into his taxi cab.  It was quite the 1 hour taxi ride with him!
Food:

Taiwan has very good breakfasts.  The three photos above were our longest wait time (40 minutes)--it had won several Michelin rating awards, but interestingly, it was not our best breakfast.  That's saying something.

Korean "hot dog" (really a deep fried cheese stick wrapped in dough and then panko) from a night market

Sugar or custard apples.  Wow.  Delicious.

Those are avocados of ginormous size. I wished to have eaten one, but it did not happen.

That is a type of oven that they stick the bread dough on the sides of it with tongs.  Delicious.

This was our Thanksgiving dinner.  It had *much* to be desired...... (we were thankful for other things that day!) But we did see several sets of missionaries in the train station heading to the mission home for Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving.  It was so fun to see missionaries; something we miss a lot.

A few things we saw/did:

Beach near Hualian:

Love the green heart-shaped rock. 

This gorge was gorgeous.

Very fashionable safety helmets....

The temple!!  (We were at the Taipei temple on the same day and at the same time of the groundbreaking for the Kaohsiung Taiwan temple, so that was cool.)  The temple made my heart so so so happy.  

At the temple, we met up with Ting and Jasmine.  They are in our branch and went to Youth Conference in Hong Kong with the girls, so it was fun to meet up with them again.  We took them around Taipei for the rest of the day.  That was such a joy.

Taipei 101, which was the tallest building in the world for 6 years. You can see it in the background in the picture above and closer up in the picture below.  It was fun to see Christmas lights and hear Christmas music!! (something we don't get in China)

Then we went to Raohe night market.  We gave the girls some money and sent them off on their own to eat up a storm.  They liked that time together with Ting and Jasmine.

Another highlight:  going to church in person!! The plan was to go down to Tom's mission area for church.  We made it happen, but it wasn't easy!  Even a few days in advance, the only train tickets were on the 6:00am train.  It was a two hour ride (thankfully they were sitting tickets, which was more than we could say for our ride back, which was a 3 hour ride!).  I'm not quite sure why, by everywhere we went indoors in Taiwan the AC was so high that we were all freezing, so the train rides were quite miserable.

Interestingly, we ran into these missionaries on our way out of church.  We chatted for a bit and as we were parting, they asked our names.  When we told them 'Waddoups' they asked us if we knew Veta Waddoups.  That is Tom's brother's daughter.  Interestingly, both sisters knew Veta, but from separate situations.  Kind of cool connection.

Tom didn't recognize many things from his time serving there, but the place he lived in Taichung was still the same!

He did recognize this wall in the park.

And this bridge.

On our last day, we tried out the karaoke booth in the subway station:

Changing of the guards (that we saw at both Chang Kai-Shek and Dr. Sun Yat-Sen's memorial)

THE original boba--and according to those in the family who like boba, it's the best boba in the world.

We went on this awesome hike (this was actually the first day).  Not only was it beautiful and satisfyingly challenging, it filled an empty piece in our hearts:  a connection to nature.  There were very few people, no vendors, no buddhas at the top, some actual trail (instead of stairs).  It was so peaceful. 

We scaled the left face of this mountain:

For a person who would choose to stay home and make dinner for her neighbors over adventure, this was quite a stretch for me.  But I did it and it was quite fun--quite easily my favorite thing in Taiwan, next to the temple.

It definitely was a trip of Thanksgiving: visiting the place Tom served his mission (which really was the beginning of our adventures in China), time with each other, time in nature, Church in person,  and time in the temple.   It filled some vacancies we feel constantly here.  So thankful!