Shu Zen College

The Shu Zen College gave us a warm welcome. We really felt like home there. Students are curious and are willing to help us learning Chinese and reading the menu at the cafeteria. In order to give back to that community, we decided to do presentations to the students. Most of those students have never go outside of Taiwan so it was a big shock for them to hear that someone could actually bike around the world.

 Students even gave us Christmas gifts including nice letters, chocolates and really good pineapple cakes.

On the 21st of december, Taiwanese celebrate the shortest day in the year by making rice paste balls and baking them in a soup. Traditionally, everybody get one year older on this day instead of having each an individual birthday. That means for example that a baby born on the 20th will have one year already on its second day on Earth.

 Then, we walked through each floor of the dormitory. The students of each floor had decorated their floor and prepared a small performance for us. This is Christmas spirit like we don't see it in Canada.

Tonight is friday and most of the 5000 students have been taking the bus to go back home. On our side, we have decided to leave tomorrow and bike through the mountains and then along the East Coast, spend the new year in Taipei and finally take a boat in Keelung to Xiamen in China.