Yuan-Chi asked me if I wanted to spend Sunday with his family and of course I said yes! I love spending time with them and could not be more excited when I get invited. They picked me up at 10am to go hiking! It was a really short hike/walk and it ended at a beautiful waterfall! It started to rain on our walk, but it just made me feel like I was in the rainforest. I loved it!!
After the hike, we went to Taipei! I have a test on Monday in Chinese class so I was reading my text book in the car. Of course, Ula (Yuan-Chi’s seven year old daughter) has already learned this. So she decided to help me learn Bopomofo (an alphabet to help you learn the characters), pinyin (a Romanized version of Chinese) and tones (Chinese has four). She was so cute…and really helpful!! Yuan-Chi helped me as well. Most adults here do not know pinyin but he does! So I’m really excited to have them to help me learn this year. We first stopped to buy Yale (their five year old son) a desk. He was insistent on getting everything pink…a guy after my own heart. His parents asked him for 20 minutes if he was sure he wanted pink…he was. While his parents were working out the desk situation, I got to hold Ting (their 10 month old baby!!!) She is SO cute.
Then, we went to the National Palace Museum! I could go two or three times and still not have seen it all. It is gigantic. I got to see the jade cabbage, which is the most famous artifact in Taiwan. People usually have to wait in line to get to look at it. And I got to see it twice with no line! I wanted to take another sneaky picture but this time the guard stared at just the cabbage and never moved. I even tried to turn my phone brightness down and just casually hold it up. But, he started to walk towards me so I stopped. So no jade cabbage picture. But here it is off of Google. We only got to the 2nd and 3rd floors of one building and we were there for three hours! It was really interesting and there were a lot of beautiful things. That was on my big list of things I want to do this year, and now I can cross it off the list! Even though I will definitely go again.
