Day 2- Cycling, Cha, Crafts and Confucious

 

Ni hao! This is Melanie and Kieran for the second day of the Taiwan 2026 GIP blog! Today, after a night

of tossing, turning, and jet lag, we started our day off with a crisp wake-up call at 7:30 before heading down to eat breakfast at the hotel. At breakfast, there was a great variety of food, from traditional Taiwanese steamed buns to American delights like chicken nuggets and french fries! We then kicked off our daily activities by biking around Sun Moon Lake in the steaming hot weather. There, we followed Vincent and biked past beautiful views of the lake and different bridges, stopping very often to take pictures, until we finally reached the Sun Moon Lake Xiangshan Visitor Center. We parked our bikes

and took a brief pause to take more photos, refill our water bottles, and enjoy the AC of the souvenir store! We then said farewell to the visitor center and biked back to the hotel; however, we enjoyed some free sample shrimp chips that a local store was passing out by our hotel before returning. 

With a small break to fill our now-empty water bottles, we were back on our adventure! This time, we rode the bus to a teahouse. There, a tour guide met us and gave us a tour of the tea plantation, telling us about the complicated process needed to make an ideal tea. Our kind tour guide described the precise temperatures, the immense amount of time, and the love and care required to create the perfect black tea! After scaling three floors of the teahouse, we had the privilege of enjoying some fresh black tea, a tea egg, and an almond black tea cookie!

All of it was very delicious! We then had some time to explore the teahouse itself, where I (Kieran) enjoyed some much-needed ice cream and taste-tested various teas and even a tea-based candy, which I surprisingly enjoyed!

We made our way over to a traditional Hakka cuisine lunch spot, where we enjoyed a variety of different foods. There were noodles, braised pork, fish, soup, water bamboo shoots, fried mushrooms, and even basil seeds, which everyone first believed were frog eggs. After discovering that these basil seeds were in fact not frog eggs, the group quickly realized how delicious these tiny seeds in a sweet water-and-lime mixture really were!

After lunch, we continued on our journey by visiting a paper-making factory! We watched paper-making masters do their work at almost every step of the process as we were given a tour of the factory, learning about each step of the traditional papermaking process as we went. From grinding down wood fibers to molding the paper to drying it, we watched it all being done on a professional level, which was really interesting to see because all the work, labor, and care put into it explained why this paper lasted longer than its mass-produced cousins. We even got the opportunity to make our own paper, using traditional tools to mold, press, and dry it. After drying the paper on hot tables (it's like what Cold Stone has, but hot), we were able to use molds and ink to print designs onto our paper, transforming it into a custom-made scroll with glue, string, and wooden rods for each of us to take home.

Minorly exhausted (read: very tired) from the already long day, we made the challenging decision not to go shopping and instead prioritize visiting a temple we had seen across Sun Moon Lake during our boat tour yesterday. That temple ended up being Wen Wu Temple, a temple known for its stunning view of Sun Moon Lake and the statues and shrines dedicated to several local deities, as well as Confucius, whom we all collectively prayed to for good grades in both the last and the coming year. After journaling and escaping a particularly angry wasp that wouldn’t leave us alone, we headed back to the hotel.

Even though we had returned, our day hadn’t ended just yet. In preparation for our two days at Fazhi Elementary School, we were out on the pier outside our hotel practicing our previously prepared songs, activities, and books that we would be sharing with the Fazhi students. Since this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for both us and them, we all wanted to make sure it would run as smoothly as possible. After about an hour of practicing and rehearsing in front of each other, we all felt ravenous and exhausted, so the dinner break we had afterward was much needed. We had dinner at a local restaurant down the street from our hotel, enjoying more Taiwanese cuisine during a much-needed break. In particular, there was a vegetable called dragon whisker, which you can’t get in the U.S., that was very thin and delicious; it’s always good to try new foods. On the way back to the hotel, we once again stopped at 7-Eleven for a totally needed snack refill.

Across the street from the 7-Eleven was a local trinket shop, where half the group, fed up with not knowing what time anything was, bought some much-needed watches with designs from Cars, Hello Kitty, Disney princesses, and more. Afterwards, we all returned to the hotel to rest up and prepare for the next two days in the mountains of Nantou with the students of Fazhi Elementary School.

Remember to continue checking the Google Drive folder, where more photos will be uploaded as the trip continues!