Taipei

On our way back to the States we purposefully scheduled a long lay over in Taipei, Taiwan. Neither of us had been to this city, so we were excited to check it out. We took a bus from the airport to downtown and cruised around to see what we could see. We had a fantastic day and we're super impressed with Taipei and the unbelievably friendly people we met there.


The picture is too small for you to see the temperature on the Panasonic sign behind Uche, but it says that it's 16 Celsius, which is 60 Fahrenheit. That's pretty 30+ degrees colder than where we had been in Manila. We enjoyed spending a day walking around without sweating.


This is Taipei 101. It's currently the world's tallest building, but will be eclipsed by a building in Dubai this fall. It's really a pretty building and definitely dominates the Taipei skyline.


Uche's almost as tall as 101....



You could buy tickets to go to an observation deck, but it was kind of cloudy so we didn't know if we would see anything if we went up, so we just took our picture next to this mural.



Inside 101 there's a fancy mall. We did a little window shopping, but were afraid to go in the stores. What if we broke something and we had to pay for it?? And those bright pink flowers in the big pots are orchids. There were tons of orchids through out the mall and they were gorgeous.




These motorbikes seem to be the transportation choice of many Taiwanese. They had little parking lots cut out of the wide sidewalks all over the place and they were all full. Uche was checking them out.




This is me in front of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. We had no idea what it was commemorating as all the signs were in Chinese. But I found out later it's a memorial to Dr. Sun Yat-sen founding father of the Republic of China.


This was taken from the memorial stairs looking out to 101.

There's park surrounding the memorial with a little lake where we had to take a self portrait.




We walked down to a night market with a side trip to eat some dumplings from a roadside stall. The night market was super fun to look around. I found some great shoes. We had to buy an umbrella because it started raining. The rain limited our time there, but we did manage to buy some tea and dinner.

Here's my dinner. I went with the recognizable since I'm a wimpy eater. The food was laid out like a buffet and we'd just point to what we wanted or use tongs to pick up what we wanted. They'd charge you by the number of food items you chose. It came with rice and soup. It was cheap and delicious!

Here's Uche's meal. He enjoyed his fish and tofu and other veggies. We're not the greatest with chopsticks, so at one point, Uche took one chopstick and just started stabbing at his eggplant. It was more effectice than trying to pick it up.

After a full day of walking around the city we rode a bus back to the airport and availed of the free massage chairs. Uche looks like he's pretty excited about the next 10 minutes. You can see me below mid massage. These chairs may be the reason we think Taipei airport is fantastic!!

Last Days in Manila

We're now hanging out in Northern California, but I thought I could share some pictures of Manila. Things we love and things we hate. I'll start with the good stuff.

Halo halo, if you ask me this is a bad thing, but Uche loves it. So, the day before we left we went over to the fast food restaurant Chow King for some halo halo.

This dessert is popular in the Philippines. The bottom is shaved ice mixed with a sweet milk. On top is where things get crazy. There is ube (a purple yam), beans, buko (young coconut), rice crisps, corn, gelatin, and ice cream (vanilla and ube)

Uche was excited to eat it, but I just can't handle all the different things in it. A dessert shouldn't have beans.

This is Uche getting the last drop out.

Finshed! Uche was a happy man!

Now you get to see the thing I think that I may hate the most in Manila.

The following pictures require a bit of explanation. A few years ago the mayor of Quezon City (part of metro Manila) put up fences to block people from crossing Edsa, a major road in QC. He also added walk ways that cross over the road at regular intervals. Then more recently he put up fences along the sidewalk to stop the busses from pulling over and picking people up at any old place since it makes traffic even worse than it is already. Of course, if there's any kind of space people gather and public vehicles stop to pick them up.

At this particular cross over there's very little space between the fence and the stairs, so only one person can pass through at a time. This would be fine except for thousands upon thousands pass through here everyday. Here I am about to pass through the space on my way up the stairs. By the way, the mayor of QC loves the colors pink and blue, so everything is painted those colors. All over the city you'll see these colors.

Here's a wider view of this area. Unfortunately, there's something else on the sidewalk at this point that makes walking here even less fun. When it's hot, as it always is, and there's a line to get through the space, as there usually is, I hate going this way. Unfortunately I have to pass it to get to the mall where we do all our grocery shopping, eating out and movie watching. Can you see what's under the stairs with the green leaves painted on it??

Yes, that is a urinal. The mayor put these up around the city to stop men from peeing along the walls on the roads all over the place. Unfortunately, these urinals just drain on the ground, so there are now these areas that are no fun to be anywhere near. It's a real bummer to stand in line to wait to get through the space.

Delirious!

I've always wanted to see the band Delirious in concert and last night I got to! When we heard back in January they would be coming to Manila we knew we had to go. We bought our tickets a couple weeks ago, and we were prepared to skip or Tuesday evening class to go, but it ended up being cancelled, so with a clear conscience we set out to take the light rail down to the Araneta Coliseum. Incidentally, the Araneta Coliseum is where the famous boxing match, "The Thrilla in Manila" took place and there's a mall across from the center named Ali Mall after Muhammed Ali. We stopped at DQ for a blizzard snack and went inside to enjoy the show. It was a fantastic concert. We had a fabulous time, and we're lucky we got to see Delirious as this concert was a part of The Farewell Tour, so it was now or never I guess.


View from our seats, you can see we had a good view of the stage.

The only picture we have of the two of us there. That's the problem with going to things with just each other. The level of picture quality goes down!

The show! We also got some cool video that we will enjoy for a long time to come!

Birthday and Polo

Yesterday was Uche's birthday, so we started the day with chocolate croissants, coffe and fruit. We had plans for most of the day, so we didn't get to celebrate his birthday as much as I would've liked for him. Our friend Ate Evelyn had invited us to a polo match at the Manila Polo Club and our church had it's 15th anniversary celebration in the evening.


We really enjoyed our time at the polo club. It's quite an exclusive place and you can only enter if a member invites you. Our friend's doctor is a member, so we got to enjoy the benefits without the pricetag! I had never seen a polo match before, so it was fun to watch and seems like it's pretty exciting. The horses were quite amazing, and it was fun just to watch them run. They had waitors constantly bringing drinks, so Uche and I started with mango shakes, and I then moved on Coke Zeros. After the match they had a cocktail hour with lots of food. They had roasted on a spit a whole cow, plus they had three small whole roasted pigs (it's called lechon here in PI), lots of chickens, huge platters of salmon, mini cupcakes and lots of other food. My favorite part was CHEESE!! Cheese is not common here, and it's way too expensive to buy in the grocery stores, so I wanted to go wild. Unfortunately, the cheese table was popular, so I didn't get to eat my fill, but I managed a couple bites of blue cheese, brie, and gouda. I could've taken the whole trays and finished them, but I don't think the other people there would've appreciated that. I don't have any pictures of the cocktail hours, as I was too busy enjoying cheese and free soda, just trust me when I say it was amazing.

Afterwards, we headed over to our church for the anniversary celebration. It was fun seeing some old friends, and celebrating with our church family here. We got home late and fell into bed exhausted, but happy to have had such a fun day!

The polo club is located pretty much in the middle of the city, and it feels like an oasis amidst the craziness. We sat in the front row, so we had a pretty good view of the action.

This is our friend, Ate Evelyn. There were lots of people there, and it was a very international. I enjoyed just watching all the people there. It was a pretty exlusive crowd, safe to say we were one of the few seminary students there!

Uche and I trying to look like we do this every weekend! See the waitor behind Uche's shoulder, we probably motioned him over right after this picture for another drink.

Our pastor speaking at the church anniversary.

Manila Malls

Earlier this evening I was at Trinoma mall. Usually we avoid malls on weekends here because it's wall to wall people and we just can't take constantly running into people, and trying to manuver around people, and the crowds of people all around. Can you guess there's lots of people that go malling here, yes they do use the word malling as a verb?? The first time we went into a mall on a weekend when we arrived last November, we vowed never again. You see, when we lived here before we spent our weekend at the malls, like every weekend. They were air conditioned and they had movie theaters, food and grocery stores, all one needed in life. But something happened in the years since we've returned. More people seem to be at the malls. But I braved the crowds today for a couple reasons, one Uche was going to be gone all afternoon and evening and I would be too bored at home by myself, and two, tomorrow is Uche's birthday, so I needed to buy a few things. So, I built up my courage and found an empty table at a coffee shop (not an easy task), wrote a six page paper, had an iced tea, then went and bought something Uche was eyeing the other day. I survived a Saturday afternoon/evening in the mall.

This picture was taken on Valentine's Day at Trinoma Mall. They were doing a concert in the center so a large part of the massive crowd was focused on that. But it pretty much sums up a typical crowd at Trinoma. It's a huge mall that I've yet to explore completely.

Beach weekend

This past weekend Uche and I headed out of town to an island just south of Luzon (where Manila is located). We weren't there long, but we enjoyed every minute. We spent our time relaxing on the beach, swimming, eating, reading (for fun, not school work!), and sleeping. We took a ton of pictures, some of which I'll post below. It was great to get out of Manila and enjoy the beach. Since we live in the middle of the city we forget we live on an island, and because there are over 7,000 islands in the Philippines it wouldn't be right to spend all our time on only one of them!

Outings

I've been lazy about posting pictures from a couple outings so here they are now. We had a family day with our school at a local park. It was a fun day to hang out with our classmates and enjoy some fun activities. Our favorite thing there was a fabulous swimming pool, but we have no pictures of that because we were enjoying the pool too much.

The second outing was a silent retreat for our spiritual formation class. We had to be silent for six hours and we worked through different prayer exercises. We did it at a retreat center in Manila. The grounds were very nice and peaceful; a good setting for a silent retreat. We were amazed there was such a beautiful and peaceful place as this in the middle of crazy Manila.

The Ajeros enjoying family day.

We enjoyed a little time rowing around the little lake with some friends.

These ducks were following us around. You can see our classmates also out on the lake which resulted in a little bumper boats and a few races.

Working hard to take us around the lake.

Cool tree from the retreat center. It was huge. You can see a person on a bench to the right of the tree.

Below is the bench I spent my morning. It was really nice.