Elephant Mountain

  Last Saturday Rika and Aaron Meyer invited Eric and I to go hiking up Elephant Mountain with them, which is located in Taipei. Elephant Mountain is a pretty popular mountain to hike in Taiwan since it overlooks Taipei 101 (the tallest building in the world right now) and has a pretty awesome view of the city. One of the teachers we work with at Cinhua, Autumn, also came along with us. Aaron and Rika told us to meet them at the bottom of the mountain at 2:00 PM, which Autumn, Eric, and I were late for by 20 minutes (we have to take public transportation so it's kinda unpredictable)...  

  When we got to the bottom of the mountain Aaron and Rika were not there which was odd to us since they only live about 20 minutes away from Taipei. As new teachers we don't receive phones until who knows when, so we didn't have phones to reach each other with. We waited for about 50 minutes for the two until we finally said, "forget them! let's just go!!".  After about 15 minutes of hiking up the mountain we found Rika and Aaron standing on top of this giant rock! Suprise!! They were there! They told us that they got horribly lost on their bus on the way and that their cab driver took them to the wrong side of the mountain. Luckily somehow we ran into the two and made the rest of the hike with them. I'm so happy we did because we all had such a spectacular time together!

  The pictures of us with the view in the background were taken on top of that giant rock we found Rika and Aaron on. While on the mountain we found a temple, which I took a few photos of some of the outside decorations. The picture I took of the car was at the bottom of the mountain which I thought was pretty interesting because it was a British car with a Kansas license plate on it sitting in Taipei, Taiwan. 

While on the hike we went through this path that reminded us of the Swiss Family Robinson scenery. It was pretty much awesome! It was raining while walking through it so I couldn't take any photos, but maybe I'll go back for some more later. I must say, it was a fantacular day! 

While wandering in Taipei

Here are a few photos I took while we wandered through a part of Taipei. Taipei reminds me a lot of New York City, except it's much cleaner than New York City or any other large city I've been to. We only saw just a bit of Taipei, but I'm looking forward to exploring the city more! 

Children at Cinhua

These children are some of the students at the Cinhua Elementary school which is connected to the English Express Wonderland (where I work at). I help Gwen, one of the teachers at Cinhua, once a week with her 1st and 2nd grade classes and these are some of the students of the classes. They are super spunky and pretty darn cute. 

Katie & Sam Engaged

Katie and Sam's engagement session was the most recent shoot I did in the states so I thought I'd go ahead and post up some of my favorite photographs I took of the two, even though they were taken before I left for Taiwan. I plan to post Taiwan pictures up as soon as possible!