We're in Taitung! (Taidong)

 

President Yang asked us to serve in Taitung (that is using the old romanization. The new romanization is Taidong)! This is an area in the South of Taiwan on the East side of the island. As you can see, it is beautiful! The office helped us rent a car and we drove down the coast early Saturday morning. It was my first time driving in Taiwan. We heard the traffic would be really bad, so we left at 6:00am. That worked out really well and we made it safely.

Probably my biggest surprise driving was the speed limits. I'm used to driving 70mph to 80mph in Utah, but most of the time, even on large, well maintained roads, the speed limit here was only 60kph to 70 kph which is only 37mph to 43mph. The fastest speed limit we saw was 80kph (50mph) for a few short stretches. There were times on smaller roads where the posted speed was only 40kph (25mph). Residential area speed are only 30kph (18mph) but that makes a lot of sense because there is poor visibility from parked cars and scooters everywhere!

We were told by road signs, blog posts, the mission president and the rental company that there are traffic cameras everywhere and they automatically charge all tickets to our credit card. We were a little paranoid about all that and the drive felt very long because of it. 

Taidong is great! The people are friendly. The weather has been nice. It is more laid back and less busy than Taipei. We can walk to the beach. There are lots of fresh fruit stands. There are several trails we can walk and run on, and there is a "mountain" (we would call it a hill) nearby that offers a great view of the city.

There is a stake center in Taidong that houses three wards. We're here to support, strengthen, and encourage them. Temporarily there are no young missionaries here, so we're doing an English conversation group and trying to follow up with the people the last Elders where teaching. We're also trying to find a new place to live. Currently we're living in the young Elder's apartment (more on that later).

We've already had a few opportunities to share our feelings about our church and the Book of Mormon and invite people to learn more (details also coming in a future post).

Exciting times! Oh, just in case you're wondering, Elder Croft can sometimes get the general idea of a simple gospel discussion happening in Chinese, but can't understand anything else.