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! 

Thanksgiving in Taiwan

When the holidays come around and you're living in a foreign country, sometimes it can become lonely. You don't feel the same mushy feelings in the air around this season; no one is putting up Christmas lights on the street or their houses, T.V. programming doesn't get you excited for the holidays, you don't hear Christmas music when you go to restaurants or listen to the radio, no one talks about what they are going to buy for their families, etc. Thanksgiving and Christmas just feel like regular days in the heat of Taiwan (Temps have still been in the high eighties). This will actually be my wife's first Christmas away from her family. Last time I lived in Taiwan, I spent the holidays without any family too so I feel blessed to have my wife with me this time.

We have a couple Taiwanese friends who decided to have a Thanksgiving meal with us so we would feel more at home. They told us to not worry because they would get the food and bring it to our apartment. We were excited because my wife was having a hard time finding ingredients to make traditional Thanksgiving dishes. She is also still learning how to cook in Taiwan, since Taiwanese homes generally don't have ovens. Most homes only have a tiny stove top, which is basically those stoves you can get for when you go camping; so that makes it difficult to cook a real Thanksgiving meal.

The girls substituted the turkey with a chicken, pizza for stuffing, and of course the sweet potatoes were substituted by McDonald's French Fries! A perfect Thanksgiving feast!

This was actually our first time to have Thanksgiving in our home because usually we spend it at one of our families homes. This is also the first time we were able to use our wedding china. It was almost a classy Thanksgiving minus the McDonald's and pizza.

After the meal we told them a little bit about what its like/means to us to celebrate Thanksgiving in America. Then we put on the Christmas music and set up our Christmas tree!

Happy Holidays!!!

FG Christmas Video 2013

FG Christmas Skateboard Video Coming soon...

We had about 10 skaters out here to film for the First Glance Skatepark Christmas Skate Video. We filmed for about three and a half hours this time. The Halloween Video was filmed in only one hour. This time I didn't film the whole thing and was actually able to skate in it.

Skating the stairs is hard enough, but imagine doing it with the lights off! The Christmas lights didn't help much but we managed to make it work. I hope to have the video out by Christmas.