May 26th

Another early wake up! Based on how things turned out yesterday, we planned to spend the afternoon back in our place again. In the morning we decided to go to a temple. We were just going to get some breakfast on the street along the way. We ended up getting some more breakfast hamburgers, some egg tortilla things, and a giant slice of toast with a corn and ham mixture on top.

The temple was right in the jungle on a hill just outside the city. It looked like it was damaged by earthquakes so we only got to walk through the jungle around it. It was extra humid in the jungle and I was dripping sweat the entire time. We found another small park as well as a pavilion that had older adults dancing. It sounded like they were dancing to some traditional Chinese songs, but also songs like Rasputin. They did a partnered dance moves (e.g., waltz, foxtrot) to all of them. Rebecca and I commented on how well older people are treated here. They are very respected of course, but also there is just a strong community of them where they are out at the parks doing activities all day long. Grandparents are often the ones who raise the children here until they go off to school and they seem to love taking the children to the parks and on walks and things like that.

I had a lunch planned with some of the people from the university that I am presenting at, so Rebecca and the children stayed back at the apartment and had ramen noodles. The ramen noodles are a little fancier here with multiple packets of different kinds of sauce in each package. The guy who took me out to lunch took me to a restaurant that mixes Taiwanese and Filipino foods. It was right on the beach and seemed like a place that he goes to often. As he was bringing me back to my place, he stopped by the ice cream shop that he considers the best in Hualien and purchased enough scoops for our whole family.

After eating that ice cream, we headed out for dinner. There was another dumpling place that we had walked by a few times and we saw online that it had really good reviews. We got a ton of dumplings and potstickers and Rebecca also got a plate of Taiwanese vegetables and tofu from the restaurant next door. We spent the rest of the evening walking around that smaller, but much more authentic night market and looking at the different foods and clothes and toys that they had to sell. The children saw a lot of things that they wanted to buy with the money that they had been saving up for the past 6 months, but you have to use cash at the night markets and I haven’t figured out how to get more cash here yet. We stopped by the supermarket on the way home again and got two more things of ice cream – one for today and one for Sunday.

This was the temple. It was really pretty overrun with plants and everything. As I walked up around it I saw that it had some damage from earthquakes and signs not to enter because of the damage.






Christian walking through the jungle.





You can see the city of Hualien in the background. Hualien is not a very large city, only about 100,000. Still, the people live very close together and walking through the city feels like walking through downtown New York.






The children's new favorite place to eat. We ended up getting 30 potstickers and 30 dumplings and it still wasn't enough for everyone.