Alishan Adventure

Monday and Tuesday I had the privilege of going on a field trip with the PE students from my school. These are the students that play a sport. My school has four sports: kayaking, rowing, archery and softball. 

So we get to go to Alishan to Mount Ali, which has one of the highest peaks in this part of Asia. It was a really great trip. We got on the buses and left around 7:50ish. For the next few hours, we were entertained by the in-bus karaoke. Have I mentioned before that Asians really love their karaoke? Well they do. They even persuaded me to sing a song or two. I pretty much just picked the two songs in English that I knew. There weren’t many and some of them I had never heard before. Anyway… we get to our hostel around lunch time. We check in and go eat! After lunch(rice and other things I didn’t recognize), we head to the Alishan train station to take a group picture and for the students to work out. They had to run and do all kinds of cardio right there in front of the train station. They had quite the audience too. Chinese (mainland Chinese) tourists were all over the place and seemed fascinated by all these teenagers running around. 

 I also got my first taste of being a celebrity. I was asked by several Chinese tourists to have my photo made with them. It was kinda weird but fun knowing that somewhere in China little old ladies are showing their friends pictures of the blonde foreigner they met. 

After exercise, we went on a hike through the mountain. Fun, but very very cold! I managed to avoid being picked up and dangled over the edge of the pond unlike some of my fellow teachers. Yay! 

After hiking for a loooong time, we went back to the hostel and ate dinner (more rice).

Then we went and did whatever we liked until bedtime. I played cards with some of the girls and they tried to curl my hair with little success. Then I went to sleep because….. 

Tuesday morning we got up at 4 am. Yes… 4 am. We got up this early to see the sunrise at Mount Ali, and it was totally worth it. It was beautiful and freezing and the weather was perfect. We then walked down to eat breakfast (more rice). After a long and beautiful hike, the students walked back up the mountain while the teachers took a bus. Hehe… We went and took another long hike to see all of the very old trees. Some of them were around 2000 years old. After climbing a million and one stairs, we did some shopping and then trekked back to the hostel and ate lunch(more rice). After lunch, we hopped on board the bus and they sang karaoke all the way home. 

One of my favorite things about this trip was the opportunity to talk to students outside of school. They were much more confident and less shy to talk to me when we were not in the academic environment. In fact, some of them amazed me with their conversations we had. Yes there were time when we had to google a translation or call over a Taiwanese teacher, but for the most part, we managed to communicate fairly well.