Shin Guang Jau Feng Recreational Farm

My Chinese language teacher made a decision for our class to have a class outing. I really didn’t have time for the outing because I have been busy with my part-time work and Chinese courses but I’m really glad that I decided to go in the end; this trip really helped me to grow closer to my classmates.

My Chinese class originally had six students. Besides me, there is DaFu from Japan, HaoYi from Canada, JinSong from Vietnam, RuoYi from Thailand and Marcus from Germany. Marcus ended up having to drop out of the class and currently RuoYi and DaFu come when they can because they are soon going to being their first semester as undergraduate students in Taiwan. JinSong & Marus could not make it to join our trip.

I guess my grammar is the worst out of all the students but Marcus was not really around enough for me to tell much about his Chinese language ability. Anyway, I am trying to slowly improve and recently I take more changes to practice my speaking. I meet with my tutor more often and am trying to get all my homework done in time so I can hand it into my teacher for grading. I think all the students really enjoy the class and we pretty much have a fun time now that we've grown accustomed to one another. We always joke around during class and give the teacher a hard time. He's a nice guy though and can joke around with us as well.

The trip we took was to Hualien. We chose Hualien because it was the only place in Taiwan that all of us had never been to. Well HaoYi had gone but when she was a child and she couldn’t recall the trip at all.

I really can’t tell you all the places we went to in Hualien because I really felt a lot of the places looked the same and many of them reminded me of my hometown in Kentucky. Maybe it was all the mountains and the greenery.

The first day we took the Toroko Express from Taipei to Hualien. It’s quite comfortable and much better than what I’ve expected. This Taiwan Railway train requires you to purchase a seat so no one can buy a standing ticket to disturb the passengers. Our teacher could not join us because he has something else to do that day so we ventured to Hualien on our own. Before the trip I was not really familiar with DaFu but with a 2 hour train ride ahead of ourselves, we eventually found ourselves chatting about our lives. We mostly gossiped about the language teachers at National Central University.

After arriving we went straight to the bathroom and then received a call from the driver the travel agency arranged for us. He was in a rush and drove crazily to the Shin Guang Jau Feng Recreational Farm. I consider it more of a zoo than a farm. We rented a golf cart and drove around the farm for about two and a half hours seeing animals and not being able to attend any of the live shows because of bad timing.

I suggest you not to eat any of their dairy products because the ice cream tasted like cheese (so weird!) but we all finished our ice cream (which was hard as a rock) because we didn’t want to waste the money. For those that are going here (even though I’d recommend you not to go…ha) please do not buy any souvenirs until you get to the gate of the place where there is a sort of small museum and coffee shop. The first floor is filled with all the same stuff you can buy on the “farm” but this way you don’t need to carry it around with you all day long. One last thing, it looked pretty bad there. I heard it's been hit strongly by typhoons so that could be one reason but it just looked not very well taken care of to me.

More to come in the future….