TAIWAN

The National Palace Museum

Love this happy Buddha!

Celebrating Libby's 25th birthday at this sweet restaurant she suggested. I miss you so much Libby!!

This is at Sun Moon Lake. We first took a boat to get across the lake, then we rode cable cars up over the mountain.. totally fun!

Sun Moon Lake... it was very pretty here

View from the top of Taipei 101

Us with Taipei 101 in the background.. the 2nd tallest building in the world

The Taipei Temple

This was at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall

There were 7-Elevens on almost every street corner.. Trev was happy about that :)

Trevor loved this big drum! If only he could have played it...

We went to Taiwan and Tokyo this past week and had an amazing time! My sister Libby has been living in Taiwan because she is teaching English at a school there. She won't be back until January.. I can't hardly wait til she gets back, I miss her so much!! We were able to be there for her 25th birthday! Yay! It was so good to see and visit her and see what she has been up to. She planned some really fun things for us to do with the help of her friend, Claire (Thanks Claire!). We went to the National Museum that had amazing art and sweet artifacts that have been collected from ancient Chinese emperor's. We also went to Taipei 101. That was pretty cool. It was fun to go at night. The view from the top was amazing. There is a huge mall in the lower levels of the building. Earlier that day, we visited the Taipei temple. We didn't go inside, but we went into the visitor's center and met a missionary from Kaysville and she knew my cousins, so small world. On the way back from looking at the temple, we tried this smoothie drink thing that was shaved ice with mango puree-- that was super yums! We also got a bing-sha (not sure how to spell it, but that's how it's pronounced!) and that was yummy too! The next day we went to Sun Moon Lake. It was really beautiful there. At night it got a little foggy that made everything look even more magical :) There are many temples that surround the lake and we were able to visit them. That night we celebrated Libby's birthday at a fun restaurant. Trevor ordered an interesting meal :) Lots of weird-looking tofu and interesting vegetables.. all of us got a laugh out of it.

After we visited Libby, we flew to Tokyo for a few days and toured around downtown Tokyo and saw more interesting temples and pagodas and visited the night markets-- those were fun! Many Asians repeatedly came up to us and asked, "America?" "USA?" We had to laugh. One Asian man that we became acquainted with, spoke very broken English, but he conveyed that he loves to talk to Americans so he can practice his English. In Taiwan, we definitely stood out and people stared at us but we didn't mind. We only saw a very small handful of Caucasians there.

It was a great experience and we are so happy that we were able to go and visit my dear sweet sister and experience some of Asia. And we are especially happy and thankful to our awesome sister-in-law that got us awesome buddy passes that enabled us to have business class on the very long flight.. Yay!!