The below post was moved from my other blog…

This is the first blog post. Sorry I am starting at week 6. Anyways, Friday had a fun time celebrating Jeff’s Birthday! Michael, Jeff, and I took MRT to Guting to have dinner and drinks to celebrate his 21st birthday at TGI Friday’s.I enjoyed a Blackberry Ultimate Long Island Iced Tea.  Though after tasting the regular one, I would have preferred it much more.   The food at TGI Friday’s was defiantly expensive.  It was American priced, but also American portions.  I ordered the Jack Daniel’s Burger, We also tried the Tex-Mex Combo.  I find that will probably be the closest thing to Mexican food I will have.  (Still craving burritos.)

This is Jeff and I by the “Statue of Freedom” haha.

So after we got back to the dorms, most of the people were waiting for us to surprise Jeff with his card/poster.

So Saturday, we woke up early because we had to catch our bus at 8 o’clock for the Sun Moon Lake Trip.

 So we took a bus from Taipei to Sun Moon Lake.  Without traffic, it takes about 3 hours, and we did it in about that time, unfortunately we were not so lucky on the way back.

Some nice views along the way to Sun Moon Lake.  Much of central Taiwanfrom what we saw is just agricultural land.  Similar to Central California.

 We had lunch in this building.  It is a European style mansion basically.  The food was good.  It had nice boiled fish.  They also served rice, fried shrimps, noodles, and marinated beef.

 After we ate, we went into the amusement park.  I really enjoyed how intimate the park was with nature.  As you can see on the right, in the far distance you can see park of the Caribbean Splash ride.  Actually at the time of that picture, I kind of got lost because I did not know where anyone had gone haha.  But thankfully, I found this nice path, and my group not long after.

We took two gondolas to get from the park to Sun Moon Lake.  By the time we arrived the sun was almost setting.

   On the left you can see Sun Moon Lake from the top of this area that had a temple on it.  On the right, was during our trip on motorized bikes.  We rode around the lake it was s much fun because it was not too difficult nor tiring to get around.  We took some pictures and just enjoyed riding around the side of mountains, avoiding buses, and the sweet Taiwanese wind whooshing past our faces.   This is just like one of the paths we were on while riding those bikes.