Gena: Day Three, June 12th

Twas a veryy long day today, but lots of fun of course. I've already gotten emails from one of the students in a class that I visited! So I woke up a little before 6am and quickly took a shower, I think I am using too much hot water. Then, by 8am, we were at Yung-Feng High School ready to take our bus up to Taipei. First, we went to the Palace Museum. It is soo big and has a lot of cool artifacts from China's past. It was very interesting and learned a lot of things I never knew before from our very kind tour guide who's name I unfortunately never caught. After being there for three hours, we ate lunch at a restaurant with traditional Taiwanese food. We tasted a little bit of everything that our teacher from Yung-Feng, Olivia, ordered us. Next, we went to Taipei 101! It was prettyyy cool! The first five floors is a very high class mall. It was hugeee!! Not only is Taipei 101 the second talest building in the world, it has the fastest elevator in the world! When you were going up you could feel your ears pop and when you were going down you feel your stomach drop. Oh, at Taipei 101 I met the girl I hosted in Dallas last fall, Connie! It was soo good to see here, but I forgot her gift for her because I did not know I was going to see her. It made the day super good because I got the chance to see her again.

Because it was too rainy, we had to give up the zoo. No pandas for us. So, instead we went to the Memory Gardens for Chinag Kai Shek. The gardens where beautiful and the actual memorial was hugeee. Inside was a very big statue of Mr Chiang, and it looked earily similar to the Lincoln Memorial. We also got the change to watch the changing of the gaurds. It looked very cool and they did some cool things with their guns.

We got back to Yung-Feng High School around 5 or 5:30 in the afternoon and our hosts took us home. Unfortunatley, Rose couldn't come with us because she had a class to go to. We went to the mall to eat and look around. When we walked into the restuarant, a Japanese one, everyone was staring at me. One little boy was hitting his dad to get his attention and pointing vigrously at me. It was quite funny. Also, when I was eating, I looked over and there was this guy, probably in his mid 20's, just staring at me, dead on. It was kind of scary and very intimidating. It gave me the chills! After we finished eating we walked and looked around this big store, which my Mom told me was like their version of Wal-Mart. It was interesting and they had cool escelators that didn't have any steps so your shopping cart could go on them. My host family bought me some Chinese music that they said is very popular and well known.

On the ride back home I fell into some major sleep, it was kind of emberassing. But sleeping never felt so good once I got in bed! Hopefully tomorrow my jet lag will be a bit better!