On the Road to Somewhere : Backblogging: Taipei, Taiwan & Beijing, China November 2013

This November Cody had two work trips: one was in Taipei, Taiwan & the other in Beijing China. There is only one picture from Taipei on this post... that is because eating Xiao long Bao at Din Tai Fung and drinking Pearl Milk Tea was practically all we did there. Those are two of the things I know we will really miss once we are repatriated! In Taipei we stayed at The Gloria Prince hotel...I wouldn't recommend it, but our usual hotels were booked and it was a last minute trip. It was an, "experience" that I'm OK not repeating.

Living in hotels sounds very luxurious and in a lot of ways it is, but one of the challenges of traveling 80% of the time is what in the world to eat. I relate it to foraging for food...if you don't believe me just try walking down the street, reading signs in Chinese, trying to identify what you're ordering, and then figuring out the currency conversion to pay for it. It's for all of those reasons that I typically find a grocery store as soon as we check into our hotel and I eat a lot of oatmeal, fruit, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. :)

It was close to freezing in Beijing when we were there and so we were able to wear our warm clothes! (Always a plus) We even got one day of blue skies while we were there! Other than that one day we should have been wearing air pollution masks to deal with all of the smog. When we arrived we had a one day tour scheduled with Tours by Jessie so we were able to see quite a bit of the city-pictures below. Other than people really wanting their picture taken with us, seeing the Great Wall was the highlight by far! We also did something different on this trip by bringing in the book of John in Chinese and giving it to the different people that we interacted with. We later learned that bringing in Bibles is not strictly legal, but our hope is that some people will get to read God's word and maybe even come to know Christ.

Love,

Christie and Cody