July 8

Wednesday at the conference is sports day. During the other days they have various team-building activities and workshops, but midweek they put all that aside and have a series of sporting competitions (we saw sprints and 3-on-3 basketball). When we woke up it was already overwhelmingly hot and muggy... I was very glad not to be participating (although, for the record, I would have totally came in last at every event).

We stayed around the campus for the morning, taking some time to mingle with the students. The conference was at what appeared to be a private school campus. The buildings were quite old, but they had everything we needed: dorms, auditoriums, a track, and basketball courts. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the campus; for all the video and pictures we took it seemed like there was so much more that we missed.

After a morning of mixing it up with the students we headed out to lunch where I ate some of the worst food during the trip (no offense to the lovely people of Taiwan:). I tried pigs ear (which had a light bacon flavor) and this is me trying stinky tofu:

It doesn't do it justice to see it in video form. Stinky tofu is called "Stinky Tofu" for one reason... it reeks!!! It's tofu fried in some devilish blend of spices and ingredients which combine to create a super nasty blend (similar to how your powers combine to create Captain Planet, only instead of enviro-powers he makes stuff smell and taste horrible). I barely got it down.

After narrowly surviving lunch we headed into the mountain county. The country of Taiwan is an island (duh) where the urban, metropolitan population lives along the flat coastlands. The center of the island is comprised of a ridge of mountains that divides the country north to south. The mountain range is beautifully covered by dense jungle forests like a living emerald canopy; fog would hang down like a fantasy landscape painting or digital dream. The mountains are where the native peoples of Taiwan live in tribal villages.

On our van ride we stopped along the way at a small village where we picked up about 20 boxes of fresh mangos. Pastor Matthew then sells those mangos to vendors in the city and passes the money back to the villagers. Microeconomics at work!

To reach the villages in the mountains it becomes necessary to leave the highways and drive up and down the local roads. That was an adventure! The roads are an endlessly labyrinthine trail that weaves through the volcanic hills; two lane roads barely wide enough to be labeled as two lanes. On one side, cliffs and bluffs that fall hundreds of feet; on the other side...well, a feature that we affectionately called the "ditch of death". Instead of a right hand shoulder, like we have on our roads, there was a 3 feet deep, 1.5 feet wide concrete walled trench. I assumed it was designed to carry the runoff which sweeps down the mountains, but all we could see was a hole that was seemingly designed to be the exact size to swallow a truck tire. our van tires. It was a frightening ride on more than one occasion.

That night we visited Tuban, a native Rukai village. My dad preached a fantastic sermon for the people there. It was funny having Dad preach in english, and then having Pastor Matthew translate into chinese, and then the pastor of the tribal church would translate the chinese into the Rukai dialect. Double translation ftw!!

Oh, and the Tuban church served us a native feast, which only means one thing... even crazier food!

I can't remember everything, but there was squid and a strange mushroom things (which I tried). And the number one, strangest thing I tried during the entire trip is featured here:

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Yeah, that's a fish. The whole fish and nothing but the fish. Head, scales, bones and all. It was cooked so it was crispy and crunchy. And I actually thought it wasn't that bad; I even ate another!! Then they told us it's an endangered species. Yummy:)

July 7; Tainan

Dad was the main speaker for two sessions on Tuesday and Thursday morning. One of the main reasons I went along was to help speak during these times to break up the rhythm since it could get pretty rough to speak to 500 students in back-to-back hour long sessions. During the first session I lead a tournament of "rock-paper-scissors" that we adapted to "comet-planet-star" to fit the theme. It went really well considering the size of the group and the language/translation barrier. Many of the students spoke simple english phrases, and there were a few who spoke english quite well (those tended to be the older students), but most students only knew "hello" and "bye bye".

During the second session I shared the story of Evan's birth (keeping the c-section description intriguingly detailed, yet age appropriate). I talked about the wonder and blessing that they are in my life... it's not hard to share that:) At the end of the second session I led the worship team with "How great is our God". It was another challenge to lead the worship team because only the keyboard player understood a word I said, but fortunately they were a really talented group.

After the morning sessions we went with Pastor Matthew, his wife Mei Mei, and their daughter Cindy to Tainan. I love those guys. Pastor Matthew is a Taiwanese FM pastor who has a really warm and captivating presence. They were a ton of fun and gave us the VIP treatment everywhere we went. So the eight of us (Dad, Foster, Kelsey, Ben, Matthew, Mei Mei, Cindy, and I) drove in their church minivan to the urban city of Tainan. Tainan is one of the oldest modern cities settled by the Europeans when they "discovered" Taiwan. There were some fantastic historical sites we can across including:

These beautiful statue/shrine/attractions.

I had a hard time capturing the scale, but these are several stories tall.

We were going to go to the Taiwan history museum, but for some strange reason it was closed so we went to the Taiwan Poetry Museum. Here I am, listening to a reading of Taiwanese poetry.

And it was at the poetry museum that we met John Wayne. The story of John Wayne is too long to fit in blog format, but ask me about him sometime.

Dad and his new friend, John Wayne.

Tuesday, July 7th also happened to be a ridiculously hot day. I didn't remember the actual temperature, but I'm pretty sure it was 1 billion degrees. And Taiwan is also EXTREMELY humid, it may technically be underwater. So we walked up and down the streets of Tainan nearly melting when we found a sparkling oasis in the form of an Iced Mango drink. I never really liked mango, but this was the beginning of a new and beautiful relationship.

Waiting for iced mango drink.

(not pictured, face-melting heat)

As we explored the streets of Tainan we also came across many food stands featuring native Taiwanese cuisine.

As identified by my friend, Justice Hung-

from left: pig faces(pig ears),duck wins,

duck necks with heads, and the bottom are duck lungs.

the things right dish are pig skin.

And I nearly forgot! Near the end of the day we walked past one restaurant that was filming a commercial and Dad was lingering trying to see what they were doing. Well, the director turns around and they asked him to take a sip of the drink and smile for the camera. Seriously, watch for Glenn Teal starring in a Taiwanese wine commercial. It was so funny to watch the whole thing unfold. Another great day!

July 6

Sorry it's taken me so long to fill in the rest of the blanks on my trip. It's been a busy couple of weeks. I hope to finish the outline of this trip before the memories start to fade away... so let's get back to bidnas:

Monday was the first day of camp. It actually was more of a conference than a camp, but I'll get into those details in a few paragraphs. We got up early in the morning (around 6:30 i think) because we had to find our way through the underground central rail depot in Taipei to the high speed train to Kaohsiung. Fortunately we had a guide in Pastor Dinh (from the previous post) and his son, Ben. Ben is a high school student who joined us for the week. He was born in Vietnam, but was raised in America, so he speaks English and Vietnamese, but very little Chinese. He came to Taiwan a few years ago when his Dad felt called to minister to the Vietnamese in Taipei. I think it meant alot to him to have some Christian Americans to relate to, and it was great for us make a new friend and have him along.

The high speed train was very cool. I've never been on a "fast" train before and it was definately a fun experience. You may be asking yourself, how fast did it go? close to 200mph. Oh Yeah!

We arrived in Kaohsiung and rode by car another hour to the campus. There were 5 of us in a tiny car with all our luggage, so I sat in the middle with my suitcase on my lap. I couldn't see anything but canvas for the entire ride.

As mentioned earlier, the "camp" was really a conference. For you Free Methodists, it was like IYC, just on a smaller scale. It was a conference for all the Southern Taiwan FM middle school and high school groups; a total of over 500 students!

The conference opened on Monday night with incredible and exciting worship led by Taiwanese college students a powerful sermon by Taiwanese Youth Pastor Craig (who was the main evening speaker).

Another great day!

July 4-5

I forgot to mention in my previous post that we decided to visit the Shilin night market late on Friday. Yes, we were still tired, but in a foreign country you never want to miss a chance to visit something exciting.

And we weren't disappointed. It was really cool. Vendors on every side, on every corner, using every inch of available space. I would say that a large majority of the stuff for sale was clothes: hats, shoes, jean, shirts, accessories. The next most common goods were food: corn on the cob, squid on a stick, duck hearts, pig ears, all kinds of other crazy foods, and mango. I've never really liked mango before, but after a week of amazingly fresh mango it's grown on me. It was loud, smelly, and crowded... Just my kind of place:)

Saturday was another sight seeing say, we went to the Taiwan National Museum and the Taipei 101. The national museum was amazing because it basically holds the national treasures of China (taken as many Chinese fled to Taiwan during the 1949 revolution). There are plenty of items that we got to see that are just too beautiful to describe [no photography allowed:(] My faves were the 30 meter long paintings and the unbelievably intricate ivory carvings.

The Taipei 101 is the tallest building in the world. The observation deck is at nearly 400 meters. The view was incredible. You could see for miles and miles. Here are a few pics:

After those amazing sights we crashed at the hotel for a bit and then I went to speak with a college group at one of the Free Methodist Churches in Taipei. It went pretty well. I wasn't as prepared as I would have liked and it was my first time speaking with a translator. Luckily the group was really friendly and they were excellent hosts. The highlight of that day was the ride I recieved back to the hotel. The streets of Taipei are crazy! Super crowded streets and thousands of motorcycles flying everywhere in between. My new friend Justice gave me a ride through the city streets on the back of his motorcycle and it was too fun. I hope to have the video up soon.

Late Saturday evening we welcomed Foster Chase and his daughter Kelsey to Taiwan. The Chase's attend my Dad's church and it was great to get to know them throughout the week.

Then Sunday morning, we Teal's went back to the same FM church where my dad preached (proached?? praught??) a great sermon. We ate lunch with the church and had tea at the Grand Hotel with our friend James. Then we met back up with Foster and Kelsey and attended a Vietnamese FM church which meets once a month in Taipei. That was an experience:)

I could tell Dad was quite a bit worn out from the day, but he gave a fantastic evangelistic sermon translated by Pastor Dinh. It was fun to listen to him translate. We all seemed to sense that he was helping my Dad out a bit, adding and explaining things in a better way. And that was a good thing, after the invitation about 10 people came up front to accept Christ in their lives. Whew! Praise God.

After the service was over Dad became a celebrity and became surrounded by the vietnamese people as they took picture after picture. Here's a couple of my faves:

Then we finished of the day with taking Foster and Kelsey for a visit to the Shilin night market.

And this is just the beginning:)