Two weeks already??

Making noodles!

The soup that we made.

Picking tea leaves.

Our lunch

My classmate, Laura, and me at the beach.

View from the top of Taipei 101.

On Wednesday we had a cooking class where we learned to make noodles!  We made them from scratch with water and flower and had to twist the dough and smack it against the table!  Apparently smacking it against the table loosens up the molecules so that the dough will easily stretch into noodles.  We also cut up a ton of vegetables and meats and combined them with our noodles to make soup.

Thursday, we had a long day starting at 7:50 AM and ending at 8 PM.  We took a bus to the country so that we could pick and make our own tea.  The city and the country are divided by large mountains and would take many hours to drive through, but tunnels were built through the mountains to make the trip quicker.  One tunnel was 13 km long which is about 8 miles!  It's not the longest tunnel but it's considered to be the most dangerous one ever constructed.

Once we got to the tea farm, they put us straight to work!  We picked our tea leaves, but weren't able to use them because they have to sit for twenty-four hours.  So, we used the harvest from the previous day.  First, we had to mix the leaves with our hands to open them up.  Then, we put the tea into a very hot mixer (you can see it above, sort of looks like a cement mixer).  After that, they had to be rolled, which is the next picture, and lastly they had to be cooked in the final machine seen above.

After all that hard work, we finally got to drink our tea.  Since they kept handing us cups of tea (we probably had about 15 cups), everyone got a bit "tea drunk."  Being tea drunk is the equivalent to being slap happy so I'm sure you can imagine what happens when 10 tired kids get slap happy.

Once we left the tea farm we headed to lunch, then a museum, and a beach.  The beach was beautiful, but we only got to dip our feet in because we forgot our bathing suits.  The water felt amazing as well as the breeze.  It was a nice change from 90 degree, humid weather.

Yesterday, Friday, we went to Taipei 101, which is the second tallest building in the world.  It is 101 stories and 1,667 feet tall.  It also contains the world's highest bathroom, which I totally used, and the world's two fastest elevators.  They travel from the 5th floor to the 80th floor in about 37 seconds!!  The view from the observatory was insanely gorgeous.  We were able to see almost all of Taipei.

Today I'm headed to a coffee shop with my classmate, Lauren, to study for our exams on Monday.  Yup, we just got placed into our individual classes yesterday and everyone either walked into an exam or has one Monday.  I love my class though, because it is way easier than the difficult group class we were in.  I can actually keep up!

I love you guys,

Kar