Taiwan, hanging out with Wan Ting (Anny)

I met Anny in January 2006 . We were paired together by ISI (International Students Inc.?). Anny had signed up for one-on-one Bible study with an American while I had signed up for one-on-one Bible study with an international student. For the following 1.5 years, we faithfully met Tuesday mornings for Bible Study and espresso drinks at various coffee shops in Ann Arbor. Slowly, our friendship expanded beyond the confines of coffee shops. She joined us for some family meals, even some holiday meals, and eventually became a regular on the Blaauwmobile's circuit to Knox church Sunday mornings. For our part, we got to go to the local Taiwanese club's Chinese New Year celebration, eat some of her awesome Asian cooking, and received nice gifts from her family in Taiwan. Anny moved to TX for work fall 07, so we were thrilled to be able to coordinate our travels to Asia with her travels to Taiwan this spring; we spent 5 interesting days in Taiwan.

Our time in Taiwan was marked by trains. That was our main mode of transportation. Fortunately, enough Taiwanese spoke enough English that David could actually obtain tickets without too much confusion.

Our hotel was in Taipei, not too far (50 minutes by train) from Anny's hometown of Tao Yuan, which was our first tourist stop. The main attraction: Anny's parents' home, which was quite spacious in a vertical fashion, with 3 floors and a kind of courtyard on the top with a small fish pond and a large collection of orchid plants. Anny's mother has a prolific hobby of raising orchids. After a large snack, we headed off (by car) to a park on the site of one of Chiang Kai Shek's summer homes. What was interesting about this park was that it held an immense collection of Chiang Kai Shek statues. With the advent of democracy in Taiwan, the statues were apparently removed from public places, like school buildings, to this park. Lunch was in a charming town called Daxi. I believe Daxi is known for its tofu, and I ate the best-tasting tofu I've ever had while there. We tasted samples from a couple street food stalls as well; the candied sweet potatoes were popular.

The next day, David spent the day at the National University of Taiwan while the kids and I went to the National Palace Museum in Taipei with Anny and Stefan. The museum was amazing. It has an incredibly large collection of Asian artifacts; we were told that Chiang Kai Shek took most of the Chinese treasures with him to Taiwan when he fled the mainland in 1949. In fact, the museum only has room to display 3% of their collection at one time; the rest is stored in caves in the mountains somewhere. The kids found the museum very interesting, though I think Ian was more interested in figuring out Chinese characters than seeing the items on display. Highlights: some extremely intricate carvings, a ship with 7? people carved on an olive pit and balls of ivory carved within balls of ivory. Our day concluded with a stop at The Modern Toilet, a funky restaurant that specializes in ice cream treats served in. . .well. . .toilet bowls. Miniature ones at least.

Our time in Taipei ended Tuesday morning with a trip to the paper museum where we got to make paper. Even more fascinating, we stopped by the paper store next door and watched some women making incredible pictures out of torn bits of tissue paper. Tuesday afternoon, we took the bullet train down south to Tainan to catch up with a friend we hadn't seen since grad school days, early 1990s. . .