July 6

I woke up early this morning (5 am) to catch a train back to Hualien. One of the clinicians that I presented for while we were in Hualien invited me to come back down to visit the clinics that she is in charge of and provide consultation on what they might be able to do to improve their services. Most of the day was spent traveling to small villages and having them show me off to different people. I really didn’t have to say much to anyone, they just wanted people to see that they had a foreign “expert” from America who supported the services that they were providing. We visited a few of the mental and physical health clinics in these villages and then a village occupation program and an elderly community center. I also got to very briefly visit with the Deputy for Health (or something like that) for the entire Nation and a few of the people who worked for her. It wasn’t planned, but they were so glad that they scheduled their visit on the day that I had been planning on returning, because they were trying to impress them so they could get some additional funding for their mental health programs. 

A group of us had lunch at this secluded little restaurant. It was just in a two story hut, and there was a small earthquake while we were eating on the second floor. The whole building shook a little, but fortunately the earthquake didn’t last long. After that I did a little more consulting and then caught the train back to Taipei. That was the last work thing that I needed to do on the trip and although none of my work things for this trip were very stressful, I am glad that I don’t have to think about them any more for the rest of the time while we are here. 

Back in Taipei Rebecca and the children went to the park and did some activities around the apartment. 

When I got back home it was kind of late and time for the children to go to bed. But, after they went to bed Rebecca and I snuck out and went to a restaurant that I remember going to when I was a missionary. This place is known for their golden steamed buns – they take the regular steamed buns and then fry them a couple of times after they steam them. They were so delicious and perfect for dipping in the soup that we got.

At the main train station in Taipei. This place is really massive. It also has a shopping center for a few floors underground.




The big gate again for the Chaing Kai-Shek memorial.




The restaurant!!!



We ended up ordering way too much food for just the two of us.

July 5

Today I had a lunch meeting with some of the faculty members at National Taiwan Normal University. This is one of the premier universities in Taiwan, so I was really happy that I was going to be able to meet with them. 

Prior to that meeting we went to the temple and mission office again. I was able to show our children what the mission office looked like and tell them a little bit about it from when I was a missionary. We then walked to the big park and Rebecca and the children played on the toys there and ate lunch while I went to my meeting. 

The faculty members that I met were all very nice and even though we didn’t talk specifics about collaborating on certain projects, they made sure to let me know that they would be interested in collaborating and that I would be welcomed to come back and present at their university any time that I would like. 

After that meeting I went back to the park and found Rebecca and we walked to the temple so that she could do a temple session. While she was in the temple, I took the children back around the mission office. We happened to run into some elders and sisters that had just gotten out of a training meeting and they showed us around a little more. It was fun to hear about the different areas that they are serving in and to hear about how the church is growing. For example, we ran into the sisters who are serving in Guishan, which is the first area where I served during my mission. My companion and I were the first missionaries to serve in that area and during the three months that I was there only one person decided to get baptized. However, Guishan now has its own ward. 

While touring around the mission office I was also able to get my hands on a copy of the Doctrine and Covenants that has each page split into three columns, one for the Chinese, one for the English, and one for the Romanization of the Chinese. I really wanted a copy of the Book of Mormon like that, but they were all out and not printing them any more since they are redoing the Chinese translation. With our remaining time waiting for Rebecca we went back to the Chaing Kai-Shek memorial park and played around there. 

After picking Rebecca up from the temple, we found a place to eat and made our way back home. That night, Rebecca put the children to bed while I went back to the temple to do baptisms for some family names that I recently looked up. I really enjoyed being in that temple. There were some neat Chinese paintings. It was also funny to see the one who was doing the baptisms really struggle with the English names that I brought, even though they were pretty standard ones like Frank and Fred.

Outside of the temple.




The mission office. It is the same building and everything from 20 years ago when I was a missionary. The top two or three floors are the mission president's home, then the fourth floor is the mission office, then the bottom three floors are now housing for people who are attending the temple from afar. When I was a missionary those bottom three floors were the distribution center and other offices and there was a separate building for the temple housing. However, they took that building down when they built the new chapel next to the temple.



Back at the Chaing Kai-Shek memorial park.





Waiting for dinner.




The kids all liked the fried rice here and Rebecca and I really liked the orange chicken that we got. The orange sauce had a really good flavor to it - seemed much more fresh than the orange chicken sauce that you can get at Chinese restaurants in the U.S.

July 4

Happy Independence Day! We knew it would be hard to have real Independence Day celebrations while we were in Taiwan, but we tried to plan a few American things to do. 

Our big plan for the day was to go to Costco and have a pizza feast. As I looked up the directions I saw that there were some baseball fields on the way and as we were walking there they just happened to have some games going on. We stopped and watched a few innings of one of the games as that seemed to be the very American thing to do. It was fun to watch them play for a while. I think they were high school level students. It seemed like they were very invested in the game (they were cheering for each other and things like that), but I was very impressed by their sportsmanship (they were still smiling as they walked off the field after getting thrown out at a base, no one made any complaints about the referees calls even when he called some clear balls as strikes, no one got upset when they struck out, and there were not even any complaints or negative talk when a couple of batters got hit by the ball). 

After that we made our way to Costco. There, we ended up getting two full pizzas (one Hawaiian and one supreme) and ate every single piece. We were supposed to catch the bus home, but I forgot to look up what bus number we needed to catch. So instead, we had to do the three mile walk back. Although none of us wanted to do that, the children didn’t complain very much and it was a good way to work off our calories. 

We finished the night by watching Back to the Future. We figured that would be a good movie for American culture. The children all loved it. In general I thought it was a good movie for them, but it had more swearing in it than I remembered and a scene where the dad, when he was a teenager, was being a peeping tom. It is a movie that I wish we could get an edited copy of sometime.

At the baseball game.




A temple that we stopped by on our way to Costco.












A different and cool playset that we found on our way to Costco.






Excited about the pizza!

July 3

Today we went to the National Palace Museum. I mentioned in the last post that Chaing Kai-Shek kept moving China’s gold reserves and artwork around the nation of China as they fled from the Communists. Well eventually they transferred it all to Taiwan and this is the museum that they built for it. Many say that the best historic Chinese art and artifacts can be found in this museum. It is located a little outside the main city of Taipei, so we had to take two buses to get there. The building itself is beautiful and I always love seeing the Chinese style architecture in the buildings. 

Rebecca and I enjoyed the museum a lot. We started on the top with the bronze sculptures and artifacts. We both felt like that was interesting, but with the amount of artifacts that they had it became a little dry by the end of the floor. We both loved the second and third floors though. Those floors included ceramics, jade carvings, paintings, and furniture. We spent the whole day in the museum with a short lunch break half way through. We finished up with the museum by visiting a small children’s section with a few interactive exhibits. 

After the museum we walked a couple miles to the night market for this area. It is supposed to be one of the top five night markets in Taipei. Rather than having a dedicated place like the night markets that we went to in Hualien, Tainan, and Jilong, this night market just wove its way in and out of the streets. There were lots of food and clothing vendors on each side of the road. There were even mobile ones in the middle of the road; however, when we attempted to buy something from one of the middle ones, she quickly closed up her shop and rolled her cart down the middle of a side alley. We saw all the other middle ones follow after her. I asked someone what had happened and they said that someone had spotted a police officer. So I guess maybe the mobile places do not have a permit to sell things at the market. We saw them throughout the whole night moving their carts back and forth out of the little side alleys to avoid the police as they would walk by. It was late by the time we left that night market and I don’t think we got back to our apartment until 9pm or so that night.

Paper airplanes was a major activity for our kids on this trip. They had no other toys and we had very limited space, so everywhere we went they would gather as much paper as the could and then when we were back at our apartment make dozens of paper airplanes. Here is Agnes throwing one in the bathroom.




Outside of the National Palace Museum






One of the weapons exhibits.







Sorry about the poor pictures, I don't really know how to get the lighting right.










Read the sign at the bottom of the picture to see what this statue actually was.

























At a park on the way to the night market.






One of the side roads of the shilin night market.



Some giant sausages on a stick.






A cheesy potato with lots of toppings.

July 2

Where we are staying in Taipei is right next to some of the major attractions. One of the most well-known is the Chaing Kai-Shek memorial park. This is a huge park with gardens around the perimeter and then a huge memorial building in the middle on one end and the National Theater and National Recital Hall on the other end. It also has a huge main gate. 

We started our visit with the memorial building. The top of that building has a giant statue of Chaing Kai-Shek sitting in a chair. It reminds me a lot of the Abraham Lincoln memorial in Washington DC. By the sides of the statue are two guards who stand at attention without moving or talking or showing any facial expressions while they are on duty. Then, on the hour, two new guards come to replace them and there is a 10 minute ceremonial march thing that they do for the switch. It was cool to see and think about this country’s military history and the important role it has played in the freedoms they now experience. After watching them switch the guards, we went downstairs to a museum that they have about the life of Chaing Kai-Shek. 

So very briefly (and based on my limited understanding), Chaing Kai-Shek was one of the military leaders that helped with Sun Yat Sun in establishing a republic in China. They overthrew the last emperor and stopped the pattern of having emperors and family dynasties rule the nation. However, just a few years after they started the Republic of China, the Japanese came in and took over much of China. Chaing Kai-Shek was the main general in leading the revolution against the Japanese and with the end of WWII, China was able to gain its independence again. Chaing Kai-Shek became the president at the time, but then there were two parties in China that had very different ideas about what the government should look like – Chaing Kai-Shek party called the KMT and the Communist Party. There were some initial military clashes between the two parties and for a while the KMT seemed to be the dominate ones. However, with Mao Zi Dong, the Communists grew in power and started taking over more and more parts of the country. I am not entirely sure why, but the United States ended up backing the Communists. I think they saw Chaing Kai-Shek as to much of a dictator, which is interesting given the way that politics in Taiwan has turned out (right now very much a republic) compared to China. Anyway, as the Communists were taking over more and more parts of China, Chaing Kai-Shek kept moving the government and the countries gold and art south to places where the KMT had more strength. Eventually though they had to leave the country and went to Taiwan. At first their plan was to recoup in Taiwan and then return to take the entire nation back, but after a while the focus just turned to establishing Taiwan as its own independent nation. So Chaing Kai-Shek was the last leader of the Republic of China and the first president of Taiwan. I think he ended up serving four terms as president before he decided to retire from political life. He died at 89. It is interesting that depending on what we read, we get a slightly different picture of whether Chaing Kai-Shek was a good guy or a bad guy. Of course the museum gave a very positive overview of his life, but I can tell that the people who wrote our guidebook don’t like him very much. 

After walking around the museum some we went out into the gardens. We watched the turtles and Koi and found bridges to walk over and short tunnels to walk through. 

We were there for a couple of hours before heading to the National Botanical Gardens. We didn’t get to go inside any of the greenhouses because they were all closed on Mondays, but the outdoor gardens were extensive and very fun to walk through. 

That evening we went to a smaller night market that is not too far away from our house. The children tried some custard pucks that were filled with cheese and sausage and they loved those. 

On our way home we found the outdoor track for the college that we are right next to. It seemed to be very popular at night time. There were lots of people jogging and walking on the track, some that were just sitting and watching, and then others that were playing tennis or basketball on the courts right next to it. Christian and Ethan decided to do two laps and Agnes even did one. I ran the first one with Agnes and the second one with the boys. I was surprised at how fast Agnes was! She did a legit run for the first 2/3 of the track (it was a ¼ mile track) and was fast enough that I had to do a serious jog to keep up. Then, for the last 1/3 she slowed down a bit, but kept a full jog going until the end. It was so funny to see her short little legs moving so fast and to see her pass up some of the adults that were doing a slow jog.

The memorial from a distance.



Some of the gardens around the memorial. There was a group of ladies here playing some drums.




























The children found a turtle.



At the botanical gardens.

















This is the place we are staying in. We are the second floor right above the yellow garage. The bedrooms are up on the second floor and the kitchen and bathroom are on the first floor in the back. The front is a hair salon.


Some more stinky tofu that we tried at the night market.


The custard pucks with hot dogs in them.


A shaved noodle place with a robot shaver.