James promised he would post about his substitute teaching experience so I will keep my fingers from typing anything more! I enjoyed observing classes and look forward to teaching, especially my 7 year old class.
A disclaimer before I really start this blog: I plan to keep this blog honest. With adventure comes it's struggles. Often times adventure is not glamorous, however, it always involves the unknown. An adventurer must always be prepared for highs and lows and pretty much a wide range of experience and emotions. I am keeping this blog honest because - 1. I am an honest person. 2. A few friends were ready to quit their jobs and move to a foreign country to teach English. I want to paint a real pictures and not only share the stories of rainbows and butterflies. 3. I want everyone to understand why the next time you see James and I that we are changed individuals. There is no way anyone can return home from an adventure the same! :)
So, after James finished subbing his last class on Friday evening we packed and left on a train to Taipei. We planned to stay at the recommended hotel by our school through the following Friday when our teacher training ended. We arrived in Taipei around 10pm. We exit the train and go to the incredibly awesome MRT station in Taipei. A foreigner sees we are a bit confused and offers his help. He's from Michigan and has lived in Taipei teaching for a few years. I just rolled my eyes. Ohh...another person from Michigan. You Michiganders are EVERYWHERE!!!!!!
We arrived safe and sound at our hotel. We were hungry so we searched for food and came back to our room around midnight. One problem...there are small cockroaches all over the walls. GROSS!!!!!!!! The whole hotel was pretty nasty and as most of you know, we stay at hostels all the time so we are pretty lenient about where we stay. Confession...we slept with the lights on. I think we both got about 2 hours of sleep. Why would this be the recommended hotel? We don't understand this one. At 6am we were out the door calling every hotel and hostel in Taipei in our guide book. The cities here are more crowded with visitors on the weekends so most places are booked. We finally found a room that was twice as much as our cockroach hotel but we would have paid 10x as much to get out of there. We grabbed our bags and headed to the new hotel! Success and relief!!!!!!!!!
Later than anticipated, we headed to Yangmingshan National Park. Taipei is awesome for public transportation! We walked to the train station and hopped on a bus that took us straight to the National Park in less than 40 minutes. Riding through Taipei made me fall in love with the city quickly. There are tons of well-maintained green parks. The city streets are kept clean. A 25 mile (one-way) cycling and running path runs along the clean river that divides the city. There are signs for the public transportation in English! Several locals speak English and they don't stare at the foreigners because there are foreigners everywhere.
The park was gorgeous. The pictures do not do it justice. The mountains are all GREEN! The park is quite large so it would have taken a week to cover all the trails. Walking towards the visitor center, a Taiwanese man offered his help. Of course, he had like 5 English maps of the park just so he could help people out. We asked him his favorite trail. He suggested the trail to the highest peak in the park at 1120 meters. The Rockwells can't turn down a challenge so we started up the 2.4k trail of stairs.
Stairs? So the forests here are so thick that cutting a trail ain't so easy. Also, to avoid switchbacks, the trail makers use stone stairs. Apparently, a lot of the hiking in Taiwan is stairs so don't challenge either of us to a stair stepping contest when we get home. We will be pros by then! We headed us the steep, slick stairs. The 2.4k took us one hour to reach the peak with no resting. On the way up, we were literally surrounded by beautiful butterflies on numerous occasions. The first time I giggled like a school girl. James loved it.
From the peak, we were supposed to be to be able to see for miles. However, a thick misty fog came over the mountain so we could not see much. Ohh well! We headed down to another area of the park with a swinging bridge and a milk pond (the sulfur makes the pond look like milk). The views cleared up a bit by then and we could see the Taipei 101 building. It's by far the tallest building in Taipei standing at no other than 101 stories.
View near the peak
What the view from the peak in supposed to look like...
What the view from the peak actually looked liked!
The sweaty Americans at the peak!!!
Our trip to the other side of the mountain into a valley
Swinging Bridge in the valley
This video will give you a good view of the park. I did not know that James was recording so I am walking really slowly and being funny :)
We received a much better night's sleep. I had a breakdown on the way to catch the bus to Yangmingshan National Park. We could not find a place I wanted food to eat for breakfast. Since it was Sunday none of the traditional markets were open so we could have fresh fruit. I kept getting more hungry and we were wasting time. I whined about how everything is so hard here...blah blah blah. I am learning patience here and that 7/11 has some great food to fill you up for a healthy breakfast for relatively cheap. We did a good job to thrash our calfs a little more today. I can barely walk down steps right now they are so sore. We rode the park's bus around the park and got off at one of the last stops to check out the other side of the park. Apparently the hike was too easy for us so we decided to take the path that had this sign:
Climbing up the rope was actually pretty cool. It took us about 30 minutes to do about .5k. Wow... once we were closer to the peak it turned into an overgrown trail. Can you say spiders, insects, and snakes ohh my! It was time to turn around and make our way back down this mess. We were defeated by the trail today but we will be back when we are more prepared :)
This picture gives the treacherous climb no justice :)
Another area in the park we hiked to
We start our teacher training tomorrow. Wish us luck! We look forward to many vegetarian dinners this week in all of the restaurants that have been recommended to us and taking runs to the city parks. Also, we are now in a hostel next to our school's headquarters. We like it here :) It's clean, fun and the people are friendly. Also, I look forward to doing a bit of shopping here to complete my work wardrobe for teaching. The clothes in Taipei are priced well and are quite stylish for Taiwan.
As a side note, we were very proud of our day last Thursday in Hsinchu. We rode the free shuttle towards those green hills we can see from our apartment window. We went to Green Grass Lake that has a quiet pedestrian designated paved trail around the lake. It's only a 20 minute ride from our apartment. Then, later in the day (yes, all this before going to school...I love the teacher's schedule here!), we took another free shuttle to the RT Mart (like a Wal-Mart). We have hope and promise we will figure out Hsinchu at some point this year :)
Running pose at Green Grass Lake...should I submit this to Runner's World?
One of our fruit obsessions - the mini-banana. There are 14 different types of bananas. Who would have thought?!
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