I found the Presbytarian Church in the Taichung City

It took me almost two hours including walking under the hot sun and humid weather in the Taichung City to find the Presbyterian Church. The tasks included: 1) web research to find the destination and to plan the bus routes. 2) preliminary walk to the 'bus station' if I can find the station; 3) leaving my residence 1 1/2 hours before the church service; 4) changing the plan at the last minute and taking a different bus route so that I will arrive the train station first then taking different bus to go to a station near-by the church; (This requires an explanation which will be discussed later.) 5) walking near 45 minutes from the bus station to the church including asking people around to find the church (This also requires explanations.).

The location of the church is at Ming-Sen-North Rd. According to the web research, I can walk by to a local girl's high school (Ming-teh Girls' High School) to find #103 bus station. I had tried to walk to this bus station around 6:00 AM today, but could not find them.

Additional research has indicated that there is another #103 bus station at Taichung Agricultural Technology School, the place I was quite familiar with when I first moved to Taichung City. Thus, when I left my residence around 8:30 AM and walked directly to this #103 bus station. To my great disappointment; at the bus station, it has a notice saying that #103 is no longer in service. Thus changing the plan at the last minute became inevitable. I then took bus #35 to the train station; then #88 to Chiang Kai-Seik Elementary School.

Walking from Chiang Kai-Seik Elementary School to the church was a real challenge; even it is actually not far at all. First, the names of the roads in the Taichung City does not follow logical order. If there is no map at hand, one simply cannot find the route from one location to the other location easily. Second, Taichung citizens do not know much about their city either. They just could not help very much to the strangers about the direction. One person had directed me to Ming-Sen Rd. Although Ming-Sen Rd is a logical choice by common sense which says that Ming-Sen North Rd would be simply the North-Side of the Meng-Sen Rd. Unfortunately, when the city officials named the Ming-Sen North Rd few years ago, they did not follow this logic. In reality, Ming-Sen North is actually almost 7 blocks from the Ming-Sen Rd. What an adventure! This was almost my walking day.

With all those efforts, the important thing was that I finally found the church and attended the first Presbyterian Church service in Taiwan since I came to Taiwan almost three months ago.