We know where we are going!!

Hello everyone,
We have finally found out where it is we are going to be living for the next year at least. We are going to be living in Changhua City, which is in west central Taiwan. It is only about 20 minutes outside of the third largest city, Taichung. Changhua is a pretty small town, of about 230,000 people. Its not too much of a touristy town, but it does have the biggest Buddha statue on the island, and is surrounded by pretty mountains I'm told.



We will be working in the biggest branch that our company has, with around 1000 students. There will be at least seven other NST's (Native Speaking Teachers, like us!) at the school. We will be teaching all ages and skill levels. They are being really amazing, and trying to keep our working hours similar so that we are not constantly working opposite hours, like we were back in Minnesota. They are also looking around to find a couple options for apartments for us to look at when we get done with training next week, and we may be lucky enough that they find a furnished place!

On Saturday, we went to the Taipei Zoo. Two words, freakin' huge. It is about 4x the size of the San Diego Zoo, and man did our feet hurt at the end of the day. It was an absolutely fantastic place though. They had a Formosan section (Formosa is another name for Taiwan, the Portugese called it that when they "discovered" this place) which was very neat. There were some Formosan Monkeys which were highly entertaining. They were playing around on their trees/islands, which were surrounded by water, when all of a sudden a monkey did a cannonball into the water and started to swim around! Which wasn't a bad idea because it had to be at least 95 degrees outside at that point. Shortly after that, we got our first true experience with the weather we had been expecting from the start... massive amounts of rain. It poured for at least two hours. Even underneath an umbrella, we were very wet. At one point, we tried to walk through a "puddle" that turned out to be a small lake. Not exaggerating, it was at least three inches deep! On one photo you can kind of see just how hard it is raining, and if you look real close you can see a crocodile. Although we got very wet, it was an amazing day. We got to see lots of cool animals, and the actual zoo atmosphere is fantastic. The zoo was built into the mountains, and the plants and natural habit just added to the experience. Also, we found it really entertaining when walking through the "temperate zone" to see how amazed the locals were at a beaver. They also went absolutely crazy over the mountain lion. I imagine its something like us when we see a monkey in the wild, just grabbing our cameras and snapping away like crazy. We did get to see Pandas and Koalas too! Basically, it was a fabulous day and we hope you enjoy our pictures!