Birthday weekend :)

April 14, 1993. The best day on earth! Why? I was born of course. I was born pretty much the cutest kid ever. I don't have a picture of me so I don't have proof but I'm pretty sure I looked something like this..

Actually, I probably looked more like this..

When I got older I just got more and more beautiful!

Well, anyway, enough baby pictures! I know my adorableness is shocking you all.

This year on my birthday I turned the boring age of 19. Although it's a boring age it was pretty cool cause I was in Taiwan for my birthday!

I really wanted to do something awesome for my birthday because it's my one party day and Amber and Julia both had awesome birthday's so I had to have a party too.

About a month before my birthday Jared bought a ticket to go to Singapore on my birthday weekend. I was like ahh, that's chill, ya know. Then Camellia decided she wanted to go to Kinmen for a fundraiser they were having on my birthday. Basically Kyle and Aaron went with Camellia and Amber went with Jared, leaving me and Julia and Alex at home to do something for my birthday.

I really wanted to go out of town for my birthday so Julia and I looked into a couple places in Taiwan. In order not to bore you we went to Alishan. Alishan is a beautiful mountain in mid-Taiwan.

It was so amazing to go there and see green! Where I live we have literally no trees, it's all buildings. I didn't realize how much I actually missed trees. Getting there we had many adventures since it was just me and Julia going and neither of us speak Chinese. Also, we're two foreigner girls and man do foreigners get a lot of unneeded attention!

We left really early on Saturday and traveled till about 1ish. We stopped at 7/11 a couple of times for snacks for our extremely long trip. It was a 2 1/2 hour bus ride up a winding hill plus a train ride :/

We stopped at McDonalds for a breakfast because we left to early to get anything and at that stop it was pretty much the only thing open.

It seriously felt like forever. I have a gazillion of these kind of pictures we took on the bus

        

   

 So then we got there....

We found a hotel and then started our hiking. Julia and I obviously didn't research it enough because somehow we missed the fact that we were going to a mountain! We brought shorts and flip-flops, it was so cold though!

We got there and were so hungry so we picked up some beef bakes from 7/11 and we got some delicious snacks!

We got our maps and we started hiking!

It was a really amazing mountain. There were so many trails and so many different things to see. We saw the three generation tree, and the elephant trunk tree, the sister ponds, and a lot of other random things.

 <-- The three generation tree.

--> The smelly tree forest (or something like that)

 When we got to the sister ponds it was raining. It was still really pretty though.

 <-- The Magnolia garden. We didn't realize we came to late to see them :(

Speaking of coming to late, Alishan is most famous for their beautiful cherry blossoms that bloom March-April. Apparently they're not in bloom mid-April. We got to see one tree.

I took this picture of these bus' because there was a extremely long line of people on the other side waiting to be picked up. Julia and I weren't done sightseeing though and we had to walk by all of them. It was so weird, all of them staring at us. You have to understand one thing, in Taiwan they don't think staring is impolite. I'm used to people staring, we get it all the time. But this, it was just crazy. EVERYONE was staring and they kept staring till we got out of sight!

After we saw all the cool sights we decided to go back to the hotel because we both were pretty tired. Once we got there we took a "nap." We slept till 11 and then went back to sleep an hour min later and woke up at 3. I was born at 11:50 so I was up at 11:50 when I officially turned 19!

Why did we wake up at 3? Well, another thing Alishan is famous for is their sunrise. If you're going to watch the sunrise you have to get up early, early as in 3 o'clock early. We got our tickets and stood in line. The line for the train was really long but it went pretty fast. We didn't make the first train but we got good seats on the second train.

  

The train ride took maybe 40  minutes. That was a nice nap. We got there and it was so cold! I was freezing. Thankfully, we both brought jackets. We waited for the sunrise for a while, there was some man that was talking...it was in Chinese so we tuned it out.

Finally the sun rose!

And we went on a trail to explore a little more before our train left. We saw the botanical gardens....

 Good thing there was 4 flowers there. I would have felt like that was a waste of time.

<--The only cherry blossom tree we saw. 

We caught the train back home but we got off about 1/2 way to our house. We want to see a little more of the park so we walked around. There were a couple more sights that I wanted to see. 

The first one was the Taiwan Pleione Showing Area. It looked like this....

It was quite a disappointment :(

 

 <-- The walkway to see the sunrise. We didn't take it, we were afraid of scary men....

--> The  famous train on top of the mountain

 

 

After walking around for a while and waiting we left and went back home :) 

Getting home took forever though! The bus ride was forever and then we had to take the slowest train home, yep, it took over 3 hours! That might not seem long but in TW that's a forever long train ride.

We had one more stop before going home. We stopped in Pingtung to watch the Hunger Games. I thought it was pretty good. Also, just so you all know, it was in English with Chinese subtitles.