Discoveries

Tonight, Karina and I decided to go check out Kaohsiung International Church--you know, the one which we tried to find the first weekend, only to have a doorman at an apartment building where we were trying to ask directions tell us that we weren't in Kaohsiung anymore. (He was wrong.)

This time, though, we went by scooter (first time driving with someone on the back--discovered I could do it--success!), and looked up and wrote down directions ahead of time. Only parking was an issue, since the street the church is on is under construction and I fail, in general, in getting my scooter into parking spaces. But, even with that little drama, we ended up in the church five minutes before service began.

And service was good! In a lot of ways, it reminded me of Springfield Faith Center, where I attended while growing up--the pastor's name was even the same, Dave, which I thought was a funny coincidence. And the people were friendly and fairly outgoing; it turns out, several of them live near the Cultural Center, too! One guy, Mike, had on a Mariners shirt, which got me excited for a minute, but turns out he's not from there. Dave, on the other hand, is!

It was a good mix of people (age-wise etc), good preaching, and decent worship (though I'm not going to lie, at moments I wanted to run on stage and grab the bass sitting there unused to get their rhythm back to where it should have been). Basically, still no City Church, but I felt like I could learn and belong there for a year.

After service, one of the girls, Katie, invited Karina and I to get dinner with them, but we had to get back to write our weekly reports (and, in my case, blog), so we declined and went to Mosburger for a quick bite instead--one which turned out unexpectedly fishy and slightly stomach-turning (looked like a burger in the picture! Shoot!). Next time, I'll join the church group.

On the way back, we saw a little bit of the area, which is technically in Sanmin district, and loved what we saw! First of all, clearly a fairly Westernized area--Mosburgers, McDonald's, Starbucks, and Blockbusters dotted the scenery--and it was also a very young area, with young people wandering everywhere. Also, from what I can tell, it's near the Love River! Definitely a very nice (and probably expensive) place to live, and definitely a nice district discovery which I will have to explore more in the very near future.

So, one successful church visit down, I dropped Karina at the MRT station and scouted out a flower shop I'd seen on Guangzhou the other day to buy a bunch of flowers for my lesson tomorrow, "Where are you going?" We're using realia to help reinforce the vocabulary, and I volunteered to supply the material for flower shop--and as a bonus, get some lovely flowers in my apartment after we're done with them! (Assuming they survive tomorrow, that is.)

Anyway, here they are--cost me all of $150NT, or about $5US, so a bit steep for around here but I didn't feel like bartering with a nice older lady when I could barely speak the language anyway and I was her only customer.

Please note that they are currently sitting in an aluminum thermos. In other news, I need to buy a vase.

So, things I discovered today: a good church; that I can drive with someone on the back; a great area to hang out; that I shouldn't eat seafood at Mosburger; that flower shops here are open on Sundays; that I need to buy a vase. Obviously some discoveries are worth more than others--so I should really go buy that vase now. :)

Exploring Kaohsiung

I spent a lot of time walking around today, both purposely and inadvertently exploring the city. My legs are sore, I'm tired, and my body is still covered in a thin film of sweat, but it was wonderful.

Around 1pm today, Rachel and Brittany decided to go out for a walk, and I decided to join them, interpreting their plan to be a quick jaunt which would quickly terminate with a bite to eat. We got back to the apartment around 4pm, fed, yes, but also exercised and sweaty, having walked a good 50 or so blocks  in 21* Celsius heat with 84% humidity--the heat index put it at 42* Celsius, meaning that it "felt like" 107* Fahrenheit. Brittany's from DC and Rachel went to school in Florida, but I've got to say, nothing in Seattle or Eugene prepared me for this sort of all-pervasive HEAT!

The other, less exhausting aspect of the trip, though, was that we got to get a better sense of where we are in the city and how it's laid out--we walked along one of the major streets we'd driven over before, and followed it from from section 1 through section 3; the city is laid out in numbered quadrants, so if we had kept going, we could have gone through section 10. We knew this from talking to Fonda, but it was nice to see the quadrants change on the street signs as we walked, and to get a sense of how big each one was.

We also continued to soak up the culture, as we first discovered that many street food vendors (including our favorite seller of onion pancakes) are closed on Sundays, but then found that, if you keep walking long enough, you can still find plenty to eat. In fact, even on a Sunday, there are shops all along every major sidewalk, selling stinky tofu (unfortunately), fried meats, and, most especially, TEA. We probably saw four tea stores every block, which was a bit of a frustration for me as I was on the look-out for one of my favorite things here so far, watermelon milk. Eventually my thirst drove me to settle for grapefruit green tea--which was also delicious, and the juice for which the lady squeezed by hand in front of me while I watched--but the disparity was amazing.

Sights from our walk in Kaohsiung:

The city street, complete with bikes, scooters, street vendors, and one of the ubiquitous 7-11 stores you find everywhere around here.

Dogs on scooters? Why not!

When we got back, Karina informed me that the church she and I had decided to visit today, Kaohsiung International Church, had their English service at 5:30pm, and that, based on her research, in order to get there on time we would need to leave around 4:45. After a quick scramble to get ready, we set off for the MRT, where we duly transferred from the Orange line to the Red line at Formosa Boulevard, then got off at Kaohsiung Arena and took the exit toward Yucheng Rd.

Then we ran into a difficulty: the streets Karina had duly copied down for us to take were nowhere to be seen. She had written them in pinyin, the alphabetic transliteration of Chinese characters, but we remembered then that in Taiwan, they use a different system of transliterating Chinese words, and, while not knowing what characters we should be looking for, our Anglicized versions were not only wrong, but illegible to those people we stopped on the street to ask where we were going (Karina speaks Mandarin quite well). 

After two students just shook their heads at our little map, a guy with a backpack pointed us the wrong way, a man in a gambling room pointed us to a closed-up building, and several random wrong turns, we discovered from an apartment doorman that we were in the wrong district altogether, and that it would take 15 minutes by scooter to get where we wanted to go; at this point, it was already 15 minutes after the service was supposed to start. We were also unsure as to whether he was right after all, or if we would arrive where he pointed us and have nothing else to do but continue to wander around as we had been doing for the past 20 minutes. Also, we were hungry.

So we told him thank you, pretended to take his directions, and hopped aboard the MRT again, defeated and headed for home. But the adventure wasn't quite over. When we got back to our stop, we set out to find the "Noodle Lady," a friend of Fonda's who sells delicious noodles and whom we had met before, but of the location of whose shop we had only a vague idea. When we did find it (hooray for good guesses!), we discovered that, as I had known before but somehow forgotten, she too is closed on Sundays. Oh well. We had a nice little dinner at a store next door, sitting in the abandoned basement dining room as they bizarrely played samba music over the loudspeakers, and then stopped in at a little bakery with Jamba-style enthusiasm on the way back for some sort of chocolate-covered chocolate cream-filled cake on a stick. It was quite tasty.

But for all that wandering through the sticky hot day and night, I arrived back at the apartment without having achieved my two goals of watermelon milk and a church service. And so I consoled myself with water and a podcast by Judah Smith in the comfort of my air-conditioned room, together with the knowledge that I now know Kaohsiung that much better.