Working Saturday??

So, it has been awhile. I apologize, even though I know there aren't too many out there who are actually reading this :)

It has been a crazy couple of weeks. Angela visited, it was my birthday, moon festival, and I had to work on a Saturday. Maybe I will work backwards beginning with the working Saturday.

In Taiwan they have a holiday called the Moon Festival. I believe the holiday is celebrating the end of the harvest and getting ready for the winter months. Basically, they eat mooncakes, barbecue, and drink tea(like that is out of the ordinary?) So, this year it fell on Tuesday September 25, which meant we got Monday off as well, and thus got a four day weekend. Cool, right? Well, the kicker is, that they decided we should work on Saturday for missing that Monday. NOT fun. No one was happy about it. We just had a one day weekend. I seem to relate everything back to when I studied in Spain, but I was thinking about how in Spain if there is a holiday in the middle of the week, they will take as many days off as possible. This is one of those times where I think Asians are weird.

So that brings me to what we actually did for the Moon Festival. Angela and Shaun had just returned from their little jaunt to the south of Taiwan, and I had just celebrated my birthday on the roof of our apartment. Bethany's boyfriend Sam was also here and we all decided to go to Taroko for the weekend. Note: this trip had minimal planinng. Bethany and I did our best to reserve a place to stay for 3 nights, but were only able to reserve one night in a hostel called the "Farmtastic Hostel". We also for some reason neglected to reserve a rental car ahead of time. Bethany and I spent half of Saturday riding around on the scooter in the rain looking for two car rental places recommended by friends. Eventually we were so frustrated that we gave up and came home. Sean saved the day by calling a higher end rental car place and we got one.

So we left for Taroko/Hualien Saturday afternoon. The entire trip was rainy. Constant. Rain. We even got stuck on a road for 2 hours because a rock slide. The drive was beautiful, but terrifying(at least for me) because we were driving on the side of a cliff in the rain. I kept reliving a skidding-out experience my family had when I was little on a mountain road in Mexico. We made it there, and our host met us and showed us the way to what turned out to be a very beautifully located hostel/home-stay.

We explored Taroko Gorge the next day....in the rain. This place is amazingly beautiful. I can't even explain it. It's up there with Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for sure. The first 20 minutes we were driving through the gorge, we were wide-eyed and snapping pictures like crazy. Actually, I don't think the cameras stopped all day. Pretty cool despite the rain. If you ever come to Taiwan, I will take you there.

The second night we staying in another home-stay with the craziest Taiwanese couple I have met yet. They were kind enough to show us around the town, take us to dinner and take us to an Aboriginal dance. The lady didn't know much english, so the night mainly consisted of a lot of laughing, gestures, and "ums". She was really hillarious....they took about 1,000 pictures of all of us. Since I was the only one on the trip without a significant other, they thought it was appropriate to have me pose for pictures by myself. How sweet.

The last night we got to stay in a roomy hotel with piped-in "hot springs". The third night it FINALLY stopped raining! There wasn't much to do, so we just sat in the springs and ate traditional street food. The perfect end to the vacation.

We said goodbye to Shaun and Angela on Tuesday. It was so great to have them here....my birthday they made Fajitas and Margaritas. That was definitely the best present I got. Besides them coming here of course. :)