Yesterday was so much fun!  I feel like this phrase is getting repetitive, but it is still true. Everything yesterday was really exciting.  We started off by visiting Gold Ecological Park, which is the site of the last remaining gold mine in Taiwan.  The area was occupied by the Japanese during their rule, and a house was built in preparation for the Japanese Crown Prince when he was coming for his vacation in Taiwan.  However, he never actually stayed in the house.  One of the neat features on the property is the mini golf course they built in the back yard out of concrete.  In addition to the house, we also got to tour a small section of the mine tunnel.  Other important features at Gold Ecological Park are a mountain that looks like a pregnant woman lying down and another mountain that looks like it has a teapot on top of it.

Our next stop was the town of Jiufen.  We had three hours to spend shopping around the town, which was really cute.  It had narrow streets that were lined with really good shops for food and souvenirs.  It was actually the type of shopping that I had been expecting to find in Taiwan and hadn't seen yet.  Jiufen is also special because one of the streets, lined with red lanterns was what inspired part of the setting of the Miyazaki film, Spirited Away.  I tried three different foods while in Jiufen that were all delicious.  The first was taro balls with sweet potato and red bean over ice.  It was nice to have cold food for a change because so much Taiwanese food is boiling hot (literally).  The next snack I tried was a waffle type of cake that was filled with custard.  It was also quite tasty.  The third thing I tried was my favorite, and it was essentially an ice cream burrito.  It is made with a rice based tortilla, candied peanut powder that they shave off of a big block right in front of you, and two scoops of ice cream.  I tried a scoop each of red bean and pineapple flavor.  Both were good, but the red bean was my favorite.  This was probably my favorite thing that I have eaten in Taiwan so far.

After our shopping spree, we headed to Shifen, the town famous for its lantern festival.  In Shifen we stayed at a quaint bed and breakfast with really nice rooms.  It was the first real bed that I have slept on here.  Dinner was interesting...I had some sort of hot pot meal, which is literally served boiling over a flame.  It had cabbage, green chile, chicken, mushrooms, and some other greens in it.  It wasn't my favorite, but it came with a bowl of fresh mango and passionfruit slivers that were delicious.  Our next activity was decorating lanterns to launch.  We got into pairs to draw/write our wishes on the lanterns.  Rebecca and I shared a lantern, and our wishes were for safety and joy during our trip and for the friendships that we are forming on this adventure.  Neither of us had ever launched a lantern before, so it was a really fun and exciting experience.  

The final activity for the day was KTV (basically karaoke) in the B&B.  KTV is area lly popular activity for teenagers/twenty-somethings in Taiwan.  It is a little different from American karaoke because a group will rent a room to KTV in by themselves instead of everyone being together like in a US karaoke bar.  At the B&B, they had a projector and two microphones in the upstairs common area.  All of the songs were in Chinese and were older songs that the Chinese kids said were popular when their parents were young, but it was still hilarious to watch.  I was surprised by several people that had had good singing voices.  I was wore out by the end of the day, but I had a great time.