Day 66 -- July 29

Class went for so long today. I can do three hours of Mandarin no problem, four makes  me tired but it is doable. Five and half makes me want to curl up into a ball. It was so much information at some point I shut my brain down and could not learn anymore. But it’s alright I made it through one way or another. After Class I met up with James and his buddy Scott. We were planning to meet up with Johnny at the Shilin night market. I got to meet a new friend, Bernadette. She has been studying in Japan and popped over for a visit of Taiwan. I had a great time hanging out with her. We kinda just wandered around Taipei for a little bit eating our way through. Now as you know I have been talking about going to Taizhong with James, Johnny and Scott. I leave tomorrow morning. I will have my Ipad with me so I will be keeping up my blog but I don’t have anyway to upload pictures so I will have one big post when I get back (or three smaller posts just to keep it manageable). I should be back Thursday my time so Wednesday night-ish for everyone else. It should be a lot of fun I am really looking forward to it. See you in a couple of days!

The paper is meant to wipe away the sweat but when you are Johnny that task is near impossible

Day 65 -- July 28

A very easy going Sunday for me. I got up late and stayed around in my Pjs for a long while just enjoying relaxing. Watched a few TV shows and went down stairs for food. came back up took a nap. I also managed to get some homework in there for tomorrow. I will be going to class and then leave early Tuesday for Taizhong (I have been spelling it wrong). It think it’ll be a good time. I went out with Johnny and got some pineapple to enjoy. The last couple times I have really enjoyed the fruit. I will miss the the very cheap fruit stands, after dinner fruit is my favorite. Not much of a blog for today though not to much of a surprise. Tomorrow might also be small, but we shall see that might change. Well that’s what I have for everyone today. I’ll post more pictures of the botanical garden and the little museum inside. Enjoy!

Dignitaries house turned museum

These are the original doors, they are a couple hundred years old

Day 64 -- July 27

Today ended up being a Reno group hang out day. We all went to Magic Bagel for an American-ish style breakfast. Finding breakfast here is about as easy as finding a person who speaks fluent spanish. You can find them it’s just darn near impossible. But the food was actually really good and I enjoyed the banter between everyone. We just sat and talked awhile about the next week. Johnny friend is coming in and they are going to be essentially touring the man around. I will bee going with them to Taichung on Tuesday. I will have class on Monday so it all works out quite nicely for me. I may hop in on some of the activities on Sunday or Monday but I am not quite sure yet. I need to make sure everything is set up so that going to Taichung is easy to do.

    After breakfast Jillian and I split off to go to the Botanical Gardens. It’s a free area that’s essentially a really large park with labeled flower areas. We had a fantastic time. We just wandered around for a good hour or two and snapped pictures. The chatting is nice it was fun to have girl time. We are usually always with the boys so it was nice to just be girls for a bit and run around doing what we wanted to do. I had so much fun taking pictures and I have a lot as usual I’ll let them do the talking for the beauty of the gardens. This pictures will be after the rest of the day. I didn't have a whole lot of time to upload so I couldn't adjust them the way I wanted.

    After the Gardens we went back to GongGuan where we went in search of bookstore with English books. What actually happened was us wandering up and down the shops and just checking things out. I actually went to an area of GongGuan I had not been before which was really cool for us. Again it was nice to just look around and the shops. When out with the boys they tend to be very mission oriented so browsing and looking about can be a little bit frustrating or darn near impossible in some cases. I ended up getting a few cheap hair things to help decorate my short hair. Jillian and I had a good time just chilling, we decided that we would go see a movie. The new Wolverine movie was out so we got everyone tickets and went to see the movie.

It was a truly awful movie. I don’t know if it’s because I am in Taiwan, but the whole thing seemed ridiculous in the “white man saved the beautiful Asian woman from her own culture” way. There was an intense amount of stereotyping and the problem was the movie wasn’t even joking. It was too serious and too much.  Every single one of us walked out of theater really upset and just shocked about how terrible it was. We ended up going out to dinner and just trying to get our minds off of it.

    After dinner we were doing slightly better, though both Jillian and Johnny felt the need to warn people about the movie on Facebook. We headed into the night market for some after dinner fruit. The pineapple was particularly good tonight, I was incredibly pleased. We headed back to the dorms and called it a night. It was the first time I had been home all day, it was nice to hang out and be quiet. I am a little bit bummed though, my head phones have broken so I gotta go spend money on that tomorrow. Not super thrilled but I gotta have them for the courtesy of others. It’ll work out in the wash. I’ll say good night for now. Tomorrow will probably be a rest day but we shall see.