July 9

Today we took a bus to Longtan to see a temple on a lake that I remember as a missionary. The trains and subway do not go to Longtan, so we had to take a bus. Unfortunately is a company, rather than city, operated bus. That meant that tickets were much more expensive than I was expecting and the trip took a really long time (like 2 hours). When we got off the bus and stepped out onto the street it was so hot – it felt like the hottest day that we had seen in all of our time in Taiwan. Our first stop was to see the Strange House. It was just a three minute walk from where the bus dropped us off. The Strange House is just a really weird looking house that is only part way built. There are some different stories about the history of the house, but the most common one that I read about was that years ago the brother of the mayor of the city started having this house built, but he designed it in a really weird looking way. It reminded me a lot of the houses designed by Gaudi that we saw in Barcelona Spain. But, part way through building the house he ran out of money. In order to raise more money he started selling billboard space. And over the years he added more and more billboards and now it is almost completely covered by them. You can only look at it from the outside and so we only spent a minute there before starting to walk to the lake. It was only about a 20 minute walk, but given the heat it felt like forever. When we got there we walked around the temple, which was unique because it is in the middle of the lake, but it ended up being a lot like the 100 other temples that we had already seen in Taiwan, so it wasn’t all that special. After that we tried to walk around the lake, but parts of the path were blocked off for construction. So we just made the 20 minute walk back to the bus stop again to catch a ride home. Kind of a frustrating day since the bus rides cost so much and there really wasn’t much for us to see or do there in Longtan. That night though made up for it all. We met up with the Chen family for dinner at Din Tai Feng, a restaurant that is really famous for their dumplings. It was so fun to talk to the Chen family more and the dumplings were delicious. We got to learn about the history of the restaurant which now has locations all around the globe. The one we went to though was the very first one where the founder started selling them as a part time thing as part of his oil selling business. After the dumplings the Chens took us to get some mango shaved ice, which is probably one of the most popular treats in Taiwan. It was fun watching Agnes hold Sister Chen’s hand as we walked around a bit and to see the kids interact and play with Steven and Angel throughout the night.


The Strange House. Too bad the signs were covering most of it up.




At the lake temple. It was so hot out when we took these pictures. I think we all wanted to hop into the lake.




















At Din Tai Feng with the Chen family.








Mango Shaved Ice!!!