Nantou 2-day trip

I signed up for  a 2 day trip to Nantou, hosted by the ISIS club. We got up at the crack of dawn to meet the rest of the group at NTU's main gate, and were divided into groups according to where we are from.  So Eva and I were put into the North American group with other 'Muricans and Canadians.  We boarded the tour bus and our first stop was a farm in Taoyuan, about an hour away.  At the farm we made lunch by pit-cooking a whole chicken (head intact), eggs encased in clay, and sweet potatoes.  As the meal cooked in the pits, we made Taiwanese Aiyu jelly, which required massaging a bag of seeds into a pot of cold water, and mochi, which took a bit more effort.  We had to pound sticky rice with a pestle until it became a uniform glob, which we then cut (with chopsticks) into little pieces and rolled around in peanut and green tea powder.  Now that our appetizer was finished, we focused again on dinner.  We took apart the clay brick pits that we had made, and washed the clay off of the eggs.  The food was actually quite good, but some salt would have been nice.

After the farm, we drove about three hours to the "Paper Church," which was apparently constructed by the Japanese for the Taiwanese after one of their churches was destroyed by an earthquake.  I guess they didn't feel like the Taiwanese deserved a real church, made out of practical materials...

This activity was pretty lame, so most everyone just hung out in the nearby cafe area.

Our last stop for the day was the hostel.  I shared a tiny platform with three other girls on the thinnest mattress I've ever seen.  That evening we barbecued and played drinking games until about 1 am, before finally getting some sleep.  The next morning we ate those weird multi-layered sandwiches for breakfast and then took the bus to Sun Moon Lake, which was surprisingly close by.  We rented bikes and rode around about a fourth of the lake.  The biking was relatively easy, until my gear shifter popped off my bike right before the most difficult hill. I have the best luck.  We all gathered back at the bus station and then headed over to a gondola station which we took through the mist shrouded mountains to the Aboriginal Culture Village theme park.  The park was very spread out, with its own gondola to get from one end to the other, but the amount of fun to be had was quite limited.  There was only about two good rides, and no lines, so the allotted five hours was far more than we needed.  We spent a good deal of time in a neighboring garden, waiting to leave.

We then began our 4-ish hour journey back to Taipei.  Everyone was exhausted and passed out until we reached the craziest "rest stop" I've ever seen.  In the US, a rest stop consists of bathrooms, some information and vending machines, but this one was a multilevel complex with restaurants, a theater, a supermarket and more.  We ate dinner in the crowded food court, then got back on the bus and arrived in Taipei around 10 pm.