Blogs from Taichung, Taiwan, Asia - page 5

As do pictures! Hey everyone, I'm really sorry that I haven't updated this thing since August. I have to type up all of my diary entries and backdate them for you. I've moved, and I'm now lving in a place that has internet (and it's part of the rent, too---huzzah!). So I figured I'd wish everyone a Merry Christmas (especially since, with my record, you proabably won't get your Christmas cards until February or March). Life is pretty quiet. I went to the Christmas celebration for my church. St. Patrick's is this tiny little parish with one English mass a week - which is actually half in Tagolog because all of the English-speaking parishioners other than myself are Philippino. They're really nice, and they keep having me volunteer for little things. I think they find it ... read more

First off, I logged onto travelblog.com today and was pleasantly surprised to find that many of my pictures from older blog entries have been recovered. Awesome! Because I don't have the time or energy to re upload them. Now all they need are captions-stay tuned. Today was the final day of classes, which is hard to believe. I can remember writing my entry 'First Day of Classes', and wow does that seem like so long ago. As last Friday was the final, this week was sort of pointless. Monday had somewhat structured classes, Tuesday we watched movies, and today we had a tea party. One of the teachers demonstrated and narrated (in Chinese, of course) the art of Chinese tea time. It was fun, and I drank a lot of good tea. Today was also the ... read more

I told myself when I bought this journal that I was allowed to leave Taiwan once I’d filled all 400 pages. I don’t know if this means I’ll be writing everyday in an effort to get out of here faster, or write only once a month or so in order to prolong my stay. Probably a mixture of both, I daresay. Had my first truly stupid work moment today. Honestly thought my class started at 6:50 p.m. Arrived at 5:30 p.m., thinking I had over an hour to prep for my class - only to find out when I arrived that everyone thought I had died or something - my class had started at 5:00 p.m. and I hadn’t shown up. So I spent ten minutes prepping, and then took over my class after break. ... read more

Well, this entry is a little late, but I finally have some down time to write. Last Saturday, we took a day trip to Lu Gang. Lu Gang is about an hour away, on the coast. Our first stop was a restaraunt-like place where we used an imitation of old-fashioned rice-clay (playdough, basically. But edible.) and had arts and crafts time. The guy leading us through the clay modeling tried to help us create birds...Well, as you can see in the pictures, we butchered the art of traditional clay figurines. Throughout the day we stopped at several temples. One, I believed named Dragon Mountain Temple, had been heavily damaged in the massive 1999 earthquake and was still under restoration. Next we went to a small, cozy museum that was set in a old house of some ... read more

Hey everyone! Sorry it's been so long. Travelblog.org has been down for a while. I'm not posting anything yet because travelblog.org is still having issues. It lost most of my entries and the 4 (of the 13+) that were recovered are only partially recovered-they've been mixed and matched with others' pictures and entries. I also got a comment that belongs to someone else's blog. So as soon as I sort through the mess that is my blog, I'll update. So hang tight until then! EDIT:: Ok, after some serious digging and copy/pasting action, I found some of my blog entries. I'm still missing a couple that are beyond recovery, but I think I can live with that. Some of the entries are not complete-they are missing pictures-but I don't know if I will have time to ... read more