Sunday, July 24, 2011
Yesterday President Baclayon rented a bus for our branch to take a trip up to Taipei to go to the temple. When I say the "branch," though, it basically ended up being the ILP teachers, the Listons, and President Baclayon himself. Small crowd (but then, that's half the branch right there!). I have been looking forward to this trip ever since our first Sunday here in Taiwan when we found out about it.
a building in/on the way to Taipei (I slept for most of the bus ride there, and this is as we were about to get off the freeway, so I think we were in Taipei by then)
A river. I know, thrilling.
More buildings we sped past
Taipei 101 in the distance
Jessica, me, and Jenny in front of the Taipei Taiwan Temple after the session
It was a really good session at the temple, but the temple is TINY! It is smaller than any other temple I have every been in, and I have been in a few of the smaller temples! They do have clothing rental, but Jessica and I brought our own clothes with us, so we didn't have to worry about that. We were supposed to go to the 1:30 session, but there weren't any men there for it, so we had to wait until the 2:00 session. The endowment room only holds 30 people and two temple workers. The session itself was pretty full, though. By the time it started, there were only 3 empty seats! Weird part: there were actually more men then women, and I don't think I've ever been in a session where that was the case. Of course it was all in Chinese, so we got to wear the cool translator head-sets. All of the temple workers that I came into contact with could speak English, and that was fantastic for me. We met the temple Matron and President Horner, too. They seem to be like the nicest people ever! I can't wait to go back and spend another day at the Taipei Taiwan temple. It is such a blessing to me to be a part of a religion that is the same world-wide. Everything about being in the temple was familiar to me. There have been no major surprises in our little English speaking branch (other than the investigator that came last week and had a bottle of beer in his bag, but we all loved him anyway; I even saw him again today, and he looked much more with it, but I think he attended one of the Chinese wards this week.
What my first sighting of the temple looked like, but taken after as we were waiting for the bus to come get us again
A cool-looking building
Another neat building
After the temple, the bus dropped us off at Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world. President Baclayon, Jenny, and I went around the block to eat dinner at Chili's (hey, sometimes you just really need something familiar to eat!), and then we spent some time hunting down Coldstone. I tell you what. Best. Ice cream. Ever! (Well, best ice cream since I got here.)
Taipei 101. Can't even see the top!
Veronica, Heather, Kylie, Christina (Sara behind Christina where you can't see her), Jessica Stoker, Jenny, and Kaylee waiting for the bus outside of 101
While we were waiting, this guy was walking around with his camera crew talking to people. Then I saw them (the guy and his crew) notice us, and they kind of huddled up and started talking. I was pretty sure they were trying to muster up their courage to come talk to us. Sure enough, a few minutes later they came up and asked Veronica where she was from, then he asked her if she had NT$100. He wanted to do a magic trick for us. I kind of loved him! I want to be his best friend (because he speaks English and can do cool tricks!) Kylie got a video of the whole thing, but I can't get it to load to Blogger. I'll try to put it on Youtube tomorrow and I'll stick a link or embed it here on my blog when I do. For now, it is off to sleep!
Next and final question before I do anything incredibly weird. For those of you that have had experience with this ambien fun stuff. You wanna share some fun stories?
Jessica came over and started talking to me and I don't know what I did. I thought I'd just looked her normal, you know, trying to decide If the ambien hit enough that I could go to bed, She have me this weird look and not real sure why.. Maybe it has something to do with the weird faces I keep giving the screen. It's really hard to type, though, when your left eye is deciding to focus at a different distance than your right eye
Man this stuff. Pair it with the right bedtime toons, and you've got an experience you won't remember but night like to, especially that whole trying to finish up a blog post thing that normally only takes 3o seconds and this one took closer to... 30 minutes.
Labels: Religion, Taiwan, travel, weekend plans
