3, 2, 1...Happy New Year!

New Years Eve was a quite night spent at home, I worked in the morning and boy was it crazy (I would have thought for sure that everyone would to home or have other plans--elsewhere!). Libbey, Erick, Alexia, and Jacob came down to join in our "festivities." Most of our evening was taken up in watching The Swan Princess with Jacob and eating root-beer floats in celebration of Mom's birthday. Once it was over Jacob and Alexia went to bed, Erick called Peru for their midnight, and the rest of us began playing a game. At midnight we popped the bubbly, clanked glasses, went outside and screamed for a few minutes, watched someone elses fireworks, finished our game, ordered plane tickets, reserved hotel for our trip, and went to bed. It was a blast :)

It's tradition to wear Yellow in Peru for New Years Eve, Erick had forgotten and no one had a yellow shirt for him to borrow so he put on a banana. 

Libbey shared her yellow necklace with him. 

Mom and Kyle--don't look so excited Kyle.

Fireworks in the distance outside, I felt almost like I was back in Taiwan with all the fireworks that were going off. 

Erick was on skype with all of his family, we turned around to see him holding up Alexia's shoe to the camera...we had no clue what he was doing. 

Libbey laughing at her crazy husband. 

Our game...look at all that green! (Mom's red, she always takes FOREVER to get anything on the board but she all of a sudden comes out of nowhere playing and whoops all of our butts every.single.time.). 

I wore yellow and I didn't eve know the tradition. 

This is my excited, cheering, happy new year expression/action. 

Happy New Year everyone! May 2012 be as wonderful, exciting, blessed as 2011 has been. 

Choose To Become

It's a new year and with new years often come those dreaded resolutions or goals for the year (bleh!), where you feel guilty if you haven't done them yet or even guiltier if you don't complete those that you set out to do. I've done it myself, I start out January 1st with this whole list of things that I'm going to accomplish for the year, about January 6th or 7th the list has been lost and I've moved onto something new.

A couple of months ago I was able to attend Time Out for Women, it was a cool experience, there may have been a few times when I rolled my eyes (picture Jericho Road singing, hundreds of women standing up waving their arms---felt a little too Christian TV to me (not that it's terrible but that's just not me)), but I enjoyed it and learned a lot nonetheless. This years theme was CHOOSE TO BECOME. Choose to become whatever it is that you need to become. They weren't saying that choosing to become means adding more to what is a very busy and hectic life. Don't choose that. Look at your life and choose to become something that would make your life closer to what you want it to be. It's a bit of different thought when you focus that way, what do you want to become?
This year I want to choose to become a better daughter of god. I often wish that I could find my eternal companion (who doesn't that's not married?) but I realized that in order to do that I need to BECOME the best that I can be, strengthen my testimony and be prepared for the covenants that come with the Temple and Eternal Marriage.
What do you CHOOSE TO BECOME?

新年快乐

Happy (Chinese) New Year!!

Before going to Taiwan Chinese New Year was just something that I heard in passing, but since being there and celebrating in person it is something that I will celebrate for now on. My roommates were just as excited to get involved with it so we went all out :)

It was Anna's night to make dinner and she went with chicken fried rice...

The rice had to be completely cool according to her recipe so we rigged up a good way to get the rice cooling while we went grocery shopping :)

The finished DELICIOUS fried rice!

All the food...not only did we have fried rice but we added dumplings (potstickers) and egg rolls.

We even took our hand at chopsticks (Candace and I may or may not have ran to Panda Express and asked for several sets of chopsticks while the car was parked illegally so that I could run in :D). I was so impressed with how long Candace was willing to try the chopsticks...she had said that she was going to last all of 5 minutes trying them and she almost went the whole meal!

Anna had a creative way of using her chopsticks

Janet had a little more experience using chopsticks and looked like an old pro!

Ciara was the first to dig into the yummy fortune cookies!

This cracked me...I'm taking suggestions

Our "Asian-y" picture

We ended our night with a good ole classic from Disney... got to love Mulan :D

Fortune Cookies

If you haven't figured it out by now I really like to bake, cook, and anything that contributes to those two. I especially love trying new recipes and learning new skills. In celebration of the beginning of Chinese New Year last week my roommate Candace and I decided to try our hand at making fortune cookies (yes I know they really aren't Chinese, but it still sounded fun). We even filled them with personalized fortunes (all thanks to Candace!).

Candace working hard at writing up the fortunes.

You spoon the batter onto the pan and then....

tilt it like your on a carnival ride to spread the batter out.

While the cookies cook you quickly fold the fortunes so they are ready to go inside while the cookies are still warm.

Our first batch we didn't spray the pan so they hardened on the pan. The second batch cooked a little too long so they hardened really quickly. The 3rd batch was the charm...beautiful golden brown.

The folding process...gets a lot more difficult as the cookies harden.

The cooling process...you can see the difference (but note even the browner ones have fortunes in them :D)

Oh look how beautiful they are!

New Year's Gifts

I am not sure if it is traditional to give gifts to others but it seems that whenever a major Chinese/Taiwanese holiday comes around I get lots of gifts (in the disguise as food) given to me, it has happened to me this time and the last time I was here. Not that I am complaining because I love getting given free food (:D), I like it because I am getting free food (who can pass that up?) and I often get to try something that I may not have tried otherwise.

Last Thursday I had tutor group and when I walked in Kristy walked up and handed me this box, last time I was here she or someone else gave me a box of these Anka crackers, I didn't like them the first time that I tried them they were a little different but I quickly did like them. They make a great snack cracker, not too sweet, and not too dry.

It's a good thing I liked them as that big box came with 12! of these boxes and then each box has 6 of these packets. Because they are rather small I generally end up eating more than one at a time (good thing I have lots of them) :D

It is tradition for Chinese New Year that you give a red envelope (I think generally it's parents to children, bosses to employees, etc.) and inside I was told that you give new money. Yuling came in after our afternoon classes last Friday and handed these out to each kid in the class and then gave Andrea and I one also. She said Happy New Year and then told us not to open it until the New Year.

Inside I found these chocolates, sadly they weren't very good :( and I only ate one but they still looked really cool. This boat looking thing plays a big part of the New Year, I am not quite sure what it means--that is something I need to ask as soon as I see people that would know again.

Thursday Andrea and I went to another computer district (more about that later) and when we walked in this guy walked up and handed us these red envelopes. I didn't think that it would be polite to open it there so I waited until I got home...
Inside I found a shiny new $1NT, yeah for free money!

Chinese New Year

(This guy popped up outside what we call the "stuff store" last week sometime, lots of red decorations are coming up :D)

Chinese New Year starts next Sunday and then lasts for 2 weeks. Part of the celebration is that everyone goes home to their hometowns, as such we will only be meeting for an hour next week for church. Andrea and I have been trying to ask people what we should do but we still weren't really sure what we were going to do with a whole week off, Yuling suggested that we go to Taipei as most people aren't from there so the town would be a lot emptier than normal, we talked about it and decided that, that was what we were going to do. Yesterday we bought our train tickets, we will leave Monday afternoon and come back Thursday evening! Now just to find where we are going to stay!