The Wedding Trip Part 1: Improving my Luck

So, Venus and I had our wedding ceremony in Boracay, on December 22nd , 2013.  But, we ended up having many adventures both before and after the wedding itself.  This will be the first in a series of blogs showing you all of it.

Venus went to Taipei, Taiwan, the day before Thanksgiving.  We picked that day because the flights were cheapest.  I needed to get through a few weeks more of school before I could get away.  So, I wasn't scheduled to  fly out until a few weeks before the wedding.

My laptop had been having issues for quite a while.  So, I decided that I wanted to send it in for repairs while I was gone.  Unfortunately, the hard drive was having problems so I couldn't make a complete backup before I did that.  I tried like 5 different backup programs and none of them worked.

A few days before I left, I decided to register for classes for next term.  Much to my surprise, there was a financial hold on my registration.  Looking at it, I saw that FSU decided that I owed them $7900.  Apparently, some time in the middle of the term, they decided that I should not have been given student loans after all and unpaid me.  So, not only did I owe them that money, but also I was expecting to get another student loan payment in January for the same amount.  And after paying for the wedding, I didn't have an extra $7900 lying around.   Even after my flight to Taiwan was delayed by 24 hours due to weather, I was literally on the phone in the airport trying to talk to people about it.

So after having almost $16,000 of financial aid taken away, you would think things could only get better.  But somehow, I managed to lose the cash I brought with me to Taiwan in an airport somewhere.  Needless to say, I was pretty stressed about the whole thing when I got to Taiwan.

Venus had planned a lot of dinners and lunches and such for us in Taiwan.  Since I got there a day later, we had to cram everything into one less day.  Most of the wedding stuff was prepared.  But we still had a lot of heavy wedding stuff that we had to divide up and get people to bring to the wedding.  Venus did a great job at planning every aspect of the wedding.  I will write a whole blog about that later.

One of the first things I had to do was meet Venus's dad.  I have seen her mom many times, but I hadn't met the dad.  This would be the dad who sat her down before she came to the U.S. and told her "Whatever you do, don't marry an American."  (Pro-tip:  If you think your daughter is too rebellious, never give her opportunities like that...)  I survived the lunch ok.  So, maybe my luck was already changing...

Venus wasn't so sure though, so she said maybe I should go to a Taoist Temple.  So we went to Xingtian Gong. I had of this temple before because they have an MRT station named after it.  In case you ever want to go to one, I will tell you how you go about getting some good luck.  You can buy some offerings from people on the street on the way to the temple.    

Step 1:  Leave your offering on the table.  You do not need to open them.  We didn't know that and Venus opened the rice cake.  The volunteers there made fun of us a little bit for that.

Step 2: Get some lit incense from the volunteer there and bow 3 times to the statues of the gods.  Then
you throw the incense in with all the others.











Step 3: Get some more lit incense from a volunteer and get in line.  Then the volunteers will waive the incense around you and say something.  They say your name a lot.  I'm not sure what else they said










At the end, you can take your offering back.  You can eat it if you want.  It seems kind of weird to me that you get to do that.  In the end, they gave this and said I would have good luck if I kept it with me.







After we went to the temple, we went to the Volando Urai Spring Spa & Resort which is always nice.

And then we got to see our friend Andrea which was really great too.

Next time, I will talk about our trip to Shanghai.