Christmas in Taiwan

Celebrating Christmas in Taiwan felt a little more festive then Thanksgiving. Some department stores and parks decorated with lights and Christmasy things. It was still difficult to be away from family in the States during the holiday season.

Thanks to Yu Fen for this awesome photo collage

Luckily, we have lots of good friends in Taiwan. The same girls who celebrated Thanksgiving (click to see blog post) with us also celebrated Christmas with us by treating us to a Mexican themed restaurant. We exchanged gifts, chatted for hours, and enjoyed having a Bible study.















The following week, we invited our classmates over for a Christmas party at our house. We did a gift exchange, talked about different Christmas traditions from each other's countries, and played some other games.

Because Christmas isn't widely celebrated here, on Christmas Day we still had class. We agreed not to study after school and just enjoy most of the afternoon relaxing. Christmas evening we were invited to KTV, which is what Taiwanese call karaoke, by one of our Korean classmates and his Taiwanese girlfriend. At Taiwanese KTV's you rent a private room for just you and your friends to sing for 3-8 hours. Generally they also have an all you can eat buffet.

We joined the KTV group from 7pm-12am while others stayed even later. We were able to sing one Taiwanese song that we learned previously and a few American songs. However, we mostly sat and watched everyone sing. KTV is a big part of Taiwanese life that is hard for us Westerners to understand, but it is certainly enjoyable to watch!