forget fashion symposium; you'll get panoramic. all i gotta say my friend - "stay aerodynamic!"

so my useless laptop charger broke late last week!!  why does everything bad have to happen to us?  we're using anna's laptop until i find out if charlie was able to get me a new charger, so i don't know what pictures i'll have at my disposable for now....... 

anywayses.  firstly - some of the people we've met here.  anna's roommate is a japanese sister named meigumi.  she's very sweet.  very quiet and reserved and disciplined.  it's strange how much we've learned about japanese culture in just the last week!  anna's friend, ai (pronounced like "eye"), is also from japan.  she's a little more outgoing, and she's been telling us about what it's like in japan etc.  everyone is very focused, reserved.  i guess after the earthquake and tsunami, ai asked her family if she should come home to help them, and her family told her that she would just be a burden because she would need a place to stay and food and water.  anna said that's a very japanese thing to say.  i guess they come across that idea a lot - not being a burden.

there's a young sister in anna's hall who's here from mexico/california named melissa.  she's around 20 or 21 and she's been doing chinese with her parents for about 4 years.  she'll be here until august.  (she wants to be back in the states in time for comic con!)

there are 2 brothers and a sister here from spain.  they go to a different congregation, but are in the same school as anna and brett.  myellen, eber, and gianni (who is like the spitting image of dwight fay) (very freaky).  they're a lot of fun.  our conversations with them are a mish-mash of english, chinese, and spanish.  their english is hilarious.  you know how, if someone's taking forever with something, we say like "sometime today"?  we were playing a game the other night, and anna was taking forever and eber said "anna, it's meant for today...."  so we've been teaching them all kinds of useful english expressions. 

me, ashley, anna and melissa left saturday morning for taroko gorge.  it takes about 2-3 hours by train from taipei.  (while we were waiting for our train from taipei, we grabbed some breakfast and we saw my boyfriend just waking up on the roof of one of the subway entrances and ashley asked me why i didn't speak to him, and i explained to her that we were fighting because i had specifically asked him to get a nice box to live in down by the river.  and if i'm not worth a nice box, then we're through.  drama drama drama.)  the train ride was pretty cool because it partially winds along the coast - so you have the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other.  once we got to taroko, we rented our scooters and headed through the gorge and up the mountain to the hostel.  i know my mom's gonna hate the whole scooter thing, but they were incredible.  it was the best way to experience the gorge and the mountains.  luckily, ashley and i have a nice healthy fear of just about everything, so we were barely moving on those things anyway.......

saturday afternoon we were able to do some hiking and then visit the buddhist temple area on one of the mountains.  it was pretty awesome.  there were hundreds of worshippers there that afternoon and they'd work their way in a line across the bridge and up the steps to the temple one or two steps at a time and then kneel and pray. 

we turned in fairly early saturday night and were up by 7:30 sunday morning.  we got ready in a snap because we couldn't take showers anyway since the hostel only provides hot water from 6-10 at night.  not too good!!  but we took advantage of the early start and AMAZING weather to ride up into the mountains.  it's hard to describe how beautiful it is there.  these immense mountains seem to just rise one after another as far as the eye can see and the clouds almost hug them.  it's the kind of place that makes you wonder if you've ever really seen beauty before.  seeing the gorge and the mountains, you almost understand why different civilizations along the way have worshipped creation.  it makes you so grateful to know the truth and to understand the creator better by seeing the creation.  to think about how only a beautiful being could create such a beautiful place.  and to think about how we can have a relationship with that being.  and what does he ask of us?  exercise justice, love kindness and be modest?  it's mind-boggling.  Jehovah has created these mountains, this earth, in comparison with which we are so small and insignificant - and He only asks us to be good, to be kind, to stop being selfish, and to try our best.  and i know how ridiculous this is going to sound, but taroko was almost so beautiful that it made me angry.  because i thought about how as humans - and especially as Jehovah's servants - we should be in awe of Jehovah and his creation.  and when you see beauty that is literally almost heartbreaking and then you think about how 16,000 miles away in america some joker is probably watching pornography and how utterly clueless and devoid a person like that would have to be - it's infuriating.  Jehovah, the Creator of the mountains and the valleys and the seas and the moon and all the forces behind life as we know it, would like us to please appreciate it and not do drugs or fornicate or murder or lie etc etc etc......  then again, maybe i just spent entirely too much time alone on that scooter with my thoughts......

sunday afternoon (that seems like an awkward segue), we attempted a hike up one of the mountains to this alleged lake at the top.  it was intense and we pretty much thought we were going to die because it was so steep and hot and jungle-y.  we ultimately abandoned the plan when we came across a second snake - one that would not budge from near the trail no matter how many rocks we threw in its general direction.  its tenacity made us distrusting.  plus, we weren't even halfway up the trail and it was the second snake we'd seen, so we figured the odds of seeing at least 2 more were pretty good.  we contemplated a possible bite, followed by the harrowing hike back down the mountain, through the gorge, finally reaching the scooters and then all the way down the mountain to the town that most definitely would've been lacking in anti-venom.  so we were looking at a pretty certain death if we kept going.  therefore, we feel turning back was a sound decision.  probably the best decision we ever made.

on the wildlife flipside, guess who spotted monkeys?  these mois!  we were driving along and spotted 5 or 6 in a tree along the road.  they got spooked though, so they scrambled down into the bushes along the road and wouldn't come out, but the humans and monkeys stood surveying each other for awhile.  it was insane.  no other animal would've watched us like that.  they made EYE CONTACT for pete's sake!  as soon as they'd catch your eye, they'd scurry.  it's like they knew.  anna got the best pictures of them.

sunday evening, we drove out to the beach and chilled for a little while so we were able to drove back up through the gorge to the hostel as the sun was going down.  we had to be up by 5 the next morning and at the train station by 6:15, so we drove back down through the gorge while the sun was coming up.  i am so unspeakably grateful for that whole experience, and i hope that we all get to enjoy taroko some day.

it's back to reality now.  we've got service this afternoon for a couple hours.  ashley and i ventured out for lunch by ourselves earlier today and somehow managed to order something.  we went to a place we've been to for breakfast a few times cuz the ladies there are really nice so we figured they'd be willing to work with us.  before we left, the one lady brought over her little baby boy and asked if we'd hold him for a picture.  he's so cute!  we couldn't say no. 

alright.  anna's back from class and we gotta get going soon.  i hope to be able to post pictures from the weekend sometime tonight.