The road to Mei-Feng

Since we have some extra free time this evening, I decided to go ahead and write some more about today.  We spent the majority of the day on the bus traveling to Mei-Feng, so this called for some special entertainment.  It turns out that there is karaoke on the bus!  There was even a small selection of songs in English (not that we knew hardly any of them).  I ended up getting conned into singing Bridge Over Troubled Water, and Jenny, Corinne, Stephanie and I sang Hey! Jude together.  We were pretty bad at it, but it was still amusing.  After lunch we stopped at the exhibition/sales hall of a brewery just to kill some time.  They were selling lots of different deserts and liquors and had a large selection of free samples :)  Some of the best things I tasted were a creme puff, a cookie sort of like a waffle cone, and some type of cake.  When we got back on the bus, Caroline surprised Stephanie, Corinne, Jenny and me with a box of Post granola cereal.  She thought we might be feeling a little home sick at least as far as food is concerned.  It was so sweet of her!

I also attempted to take some pictures of the countryside out of the bus window today.  That aren't great, but I will put some of them up so that you can see.  One big surprise on the mountain was a bunch of Dutch-looking buildings.  I hadn't thought that the Dutch colonies had come this far south in Taiwan, but they may have.  Otherwise, I think it was mainly just built that way on purpose as a tourist destination.  As we were going up the mountain it seemed like there were quite a few resorts that people from the city would visit on vacation.  In one place there was a pasture of sheep that tourists were walking around in. So strange!  When we arrived we had quite a bit of free time, dinner, some more free time, and then a short introductory video about Hehuan mountain, which we will be hiking tomorrow morning.  During part of all that time, Flora showed a few of us around a little bit of the farm because An-Chi had shown her earlier in the day.  An-Chi had been here for class before because she is in the horticulture program at NTU.  We saw the lavender, several greenhouses of Alstromeria lilies, beets, a pecan tree, and a hedge maze.  Also, good news...we get on the bus at 7:30 instead of 5am tomorrow morning! Yay!

My room for the next three nights