Thanksgiving in Taiwan

Being an American holiday, Thursday was just like any other day for us. But we set aside our Saturday to help our little TCKs (Third Culture Kids) get a feel for what Thanksgiving is like. It began with a church stake sports activity that Scott and I named the "turkey trot". Here is our ward's sweet team:

Our ward did really well and had a ton of fun together.

They had the guinea sack races (our team won)!

And bao xiao haize races (carry your child). I had to put this picture up because this is brother Xiao, a member of our bishopric, and he is usually so quiet, but he got really decked out and into these races. (Our team barely lost by a step)

And they had a relay where each team had 5 boys, 5 girls and each runner ran about 100 meters and we won (even after someone dove into the dirt)! Scott was sad at his leg because he could barely catch up to a 70+ year-old man who had a couple of legs up on him. Either that was a fast old guy, or...

And here I am getting ready for the tug-of-war. I think there were 12-14 members on each side, split between men and women. And our team chose to have the women in the back and guess who was the anchor? Yeah, me. Either I look really strong, or I've put on more weight... Diet starts on Monday. We won first round, but lost in the second. Which placed us 3rd place overall for the day (out of about 12-15 teams). It was so fun that we might turn it into a Thanksgiving morning tradition with our family in the future!
After such a fun day in the hot sun, we went back home and started prep for our Thanksgiving dinner. While we prepared our dinner, we were loving us some "Cosby Show" reruns on Justin.tv and some Christmas music from FM100 in Utah.
We invited our Bishop's family, who had lived in America for a number of years, and also one of our other friends, Carter, over for dinner. I made a soy-ginger roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, candied yams, creamed corn, deviled eggs, butterhorn rolls, and then pumpkin and persimmon pies for dessert. Some things worked with some of my substitutes or strange ingredients and some didn't. But it was fun!
One funny story was buying the chicken. The markets are open air markets and Sophie went with me to buy the food. And let's just say that it was fresher than any chicken I've probably eaten before and I was surprised that Sophie was ok with watching the process (because I wasn't). (You can see in the picture below that the table where you buy the chicken is next to the truck that has the live chickens).

Oh! And on Sunday was our long prepared-for primary program. It was really cute! Sophie said the opening prayer for sacrament meeting (in Chinese) and they both had small speaking parts in Chinese. But when Meili was all by herself at the microphone bearing her testimony, she decided that English was the way to go. But she did so well! And through the experience, I've learned that a pianist has a tough job. No one notices them until they mess up. And luckily no one noticed the pianist too much, because it was me :)
(Also, scroll down to see our Halloween post, newly added)

Moving...

No, we aren't moving home, but we are moving from one computer to a new one, which feels about the same as moving house. You still have to sort through stuff and decide what you are going to keep or trash. And, as you can tell from the lack of posts, we feel pretty displaced as well...It's a good thing we don't have to physically move anything, but instead of a backache I have a headache:) But here are some pics of the fam:

Sophie is pretty excited about a new shirt that she got. And notice the sweet sweatband which ties the outfit together perfectly

Sophie surprised us by writing some Chinese characters-advanced even if she were a Chinese kid. The characters are hua (flower) and xiao (small).

Scott's school had a 35 year anniversary last week and they asked Scott and I to dance an aboriginal dance with about 60 other teachers. They had practices every day for the past 2 months (we made it to about %10 of them), and it was a lot of fun. One of Scott's co-workers said that we are the first foreigners to participate in one of their celebrations so he called us pioneers. This pic is afterwards when the whole school was out partying with fair-type booths. We have some video of real aborigine students dancing, but we can't upload them very well. We also have some video of some sweet marching and the 10,000 students standing at attention for about 45 minutes in the hot sun. This country isn't very many years removed from military rule, so it still has some militaristic traditions. Sad, we can't get them uploaded...
And last Saturday Scott and I braved our second journey to Taipei to go to the LDS temple. We have to leave our house by 4:15 am to make the bus that leaves the church at 5:00. Then both girls got motion sick the last 2 hours of the 4 hour trip (resulting in at least 8 full vomit bags). And, sadly, all the couples with children have to split up rather than go together to make it through a session at the temple (we call it the Miller split after our old Bishop Miller's fantastic example of faithfulness in going to the temple even if you have to go alone:)), and so Scott went first and afterwards I squeezed in another and barely caught the bus home. I shopped at the distribution center at the next door stake center and got some lunch during my shift. And Scott took the kids to the nearby Chiang Kai Shek memorial during his. Here's a picture of the memorial to a tyrant that many Taiwanese want changed: (Euan's asleep)



I'm glad they had fun because, although we changed seats, Meili still threw up on the way home, too. And it is 5 1/2 hours on the way home because of traffic, and then another 45 minutes on the scooter. At least it is a good lesson to the girls at how important going to the temple is for us. But we will have to figure out another way next time-it was just too rough on them.

Happy Halloween! (Part 1)

(I was hoping to get this post up earlier, but I still haven't transferred the rest of the Halloween pictures over from our other computer, so I am publishing what I've already done)

Though it is different celebrating Halloween in a country where it is some strange foreign tradition, we still had a ton of fun. Taiwan recognizes a lot of America's holidays because learning American English and culture is such a big part of their culture. Still, we hadn't heard much buzz about Halloween other than some cheap costumes that appeared in the local stationery store (at least that's what we call it, because it really doesn't have an equivalent in America). So imagine our surprise when we get a random phone call at 9:30 pm the weekend before Halloween and welcomed this into our house:

Some of our Church ward members were having a little farewell party for our friend Mari who is moving back to Philippines in a couple of weeks and I guess they got the Halloween spirit. Or just found some face paint. Luckily we were stocked with a little candy and so we taught them about "trick-or-treat".

Then Meili and Sophie's school had a Halloween party on the 30th. On our way to school, we created more of a stir than normal and we were really late because every Taiwanese that saw us during the three blocks to school wanted pictures.



The school's English teacher led them in some songs and they had a Halloween costume contest. For the contest, each student would parade across the stage and then after they had all had a turn, they lined up and each child in the school would vote on which costume they liked the best by placing a ball in a basket in front of the child. Thanks to some sweet costumes from their Grandma in America, the girls were a hit and Meili won second place in her grade and Sophie won first place for her grade. Sophie got so many votes that her basket overflowed and they had to get a second basket for her. I guess the kids love Minnie!