Halfway there yo

We saw a TGIF's and we just couldn't resist. After two weeks of Chinese food we wanted some tasty yumyums that reminded us of America. Loaded potato skins...mmm!

The next day we painted Chinese opera masks. Before we started I decided that I wanted to be a rebel and make the mask look like a Na'vi. It didn't work, and it looked frightening. The teacher also said that a blue face in Chinese opera means that character is a bad guy! Here's the finished product. I still think it's scary.

On Tuesday we visited the Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village and Sun Moon Lake Ropeway.
Cable cars!

In this photo a couple from the Amis, one of 14 recognized aboriginal tribes in Taiwan, welcomes us in a performance at the culture village.

Inside the culture village, there was a mini amusement park. We went on Space Mountain three times.
Here's the view of Sun Moon Lake from the seventh floor of our hotel at 5 AM.

A panoramic taken by Madz.
The next morning we visited the temple across from our hotel. We took a picture with this cool soldier dude in gold at the temple entrance.

It started raining while we walked up the mountain on our Sun Moon Lake tour. Me and Kelly poncho-ing it up.
On Thursday we learned how to make paper fans not far from the Sun Moon Lake area. First we placed paper on an engraved stone tablet (ours had Pikachu on it :p) and dampened it with water. Then we placed sheets of paper on top and pounded it with a brush until the paper wasn't moist anymore.

This is what our fans looked like after blotting them with ink.

Madz cleaning up the edges of her fan after gluing the sides together.

After making our fans we observed the process of making paper.

In the afternoon we visited the National Museum of Natural Science.
At the museum, this man showed us a cool pottery presentation.

Two of our counselors, Ma Que (麻雀), on the left, and Da Xiong (大熊), on the right.

In the evening we went to Feng Jia Night Market, which is famous for Taiwanese delicacies like stinky tofu (ew ha) and tea eggs.

Madz and Kelly eating sweet potato fries with suan mei (酸梅). Yum.

For the next two weeks we'll be touring around the rest of Taiwan, so we might not get internet.

Caucasian sightings: 48