June 11, 2008 Email

well the internet cafe we are in, is kicking my butt. i cant use the usb, i get booted off the email server all the time. wow, asian computers dont like me, once i started reading these characters though i am gonna own em hahaha

well this week was a good week. good and hot. it was 39 degrees celcius a couple days ago. my arms are like black from the tan. we went 78km (48 miles) on our bikes on monday. thats pretty far. so far i have biked 1483.4km (922 miles) this transfer. not bad eh? i still am not in shape though because i eat some much of the delicious food over here.

so this week, i dog tried to bite me in the leg as we were biking, but i horsed kicked it in the face. hahaha that will teach them to chase white guys wearing business attire. the dogs hear are like rats so i didn't feel bad.

it was a hot week this week. there wasn't any rain so everything was just scorching.

well i am running out of funny stories, i needed to start taking notes through out the week of things i want to tell you all. we haven't got to teach many lessons this week, actually i think we only taught 2, that is pretty standard for taiwan. most of our time is spent just trying to find people to teach. we also spend a lot of time trying to get less active members to come back to church, so we try and find them and let them know that we still care about them and want them to come back.

i saw a centipide that was about 10 inches long! i didnt have my camera, but i almost wet my pants it was so big. scary creeping stinking thing. ewww. i am starting to get over the fear of bugs though. taiwan will do that do you in a hurry. they have some of the weirdest creepy crawlies. i am just glad that i didn't go to thailand or vietnam i hear they have even scary bugs.

chinese characters are coming good. i dont know how to type them on the computer yet, but once i figure it out, i will write you all a letter in chinese. that probably won't be for a long time though. there are about 3000 characters that you have to learn to be a fluent reader and i just finished about 700 hundred of them yesterday. once you know the characters supposedly the language gets a lot easier and things make more sense so i am looking forward to that.

i dont sweat a lot, but in taiwan my radiator has been working extra hard. my skin was raining yesterday, literally, i walked into our house for lunch and i was dripping all over the floor, my companion is worse. its so gross. we cant turn on the AC either because its to expensive, we can only turn it on at night when we got to sleep.

my next email will be more fun i promise. love you all.

June 4, 2008 Email

It has been pouring buckets of rain. Never in my life have I seen rain like this. Its like the blizzard of rain storms, you can not see more than 50 yards a head of you. And from what i hear from the locals this storm wasn't even that bad.

3 days ago we decided to go visit this little tiny village in the mountains, it was lightly drizzling when we started off. The village is about 1 hour and a half away from our house. about 45 minutes into the ride the rain started to pick up. we had our rain gear on so no biggy. anyways, as we headed into this canyon to get to the village, we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a little river, we pedaled through it for about 50 yards and then we decided that this probably wasn't the way so we headed back. the water was about 1 foot or deeper and everytime i pedaled my foot would get immersed entirely in water.

as we headed up the slope to get out of this little ravine think. there were things floating by us. mind you we are pedaling up hill and as we pedal up, boxes and cans and cups and mangoes were floating by us it was crazy.

we were joking about how we broke the no swimming rule, because it seriously felt like we were swimming on our bikes. it wasn't dangerous so dont worry it was just amazing.

i am out of time love ya all by

craig