Bonus Picture Post! #3 - A Walk Through My Community, Part 1

So I thought I'd take you all on a little walk around the area surrounding my current residence in Dapinglin, which is the same set of neighborhoods to which our church -once planted, God willing- will be reaching out.

There is a wide socioeconomic variation within a small area here, as you will see. One church cannot reach these tens of thousands of people with very different life circumstances, but it's a start, and with God's blessing we hope it will be both a quickly reproducing church and a model for planting similar churches in other locales.

Let's go!

This is the community center where we'll start teaching classes soon, and eventually hope to have a weekly service

This is a fairly typical major street around here

There's Gigabyte, for my computer savvy friends. Left foreground is a gas station

An extremely common sight along Taiwan's streets

One of the many convenience stores sprinkled throughout the area.
If I turned the camera to the left, you'd see another one less than fifty feet down the road

One of the reasons you can have so many convenience stores... population density

Let's get off the main road and find some less affluent neighborhoods

There are more cellphones than people in Taiwan,
but you can still find payphones dotted here and there...

Wandering more or less aimlessly... I find an "unimproved neighborhood"where there's a local market.
It looks worse right now than usual, I'm just there when everything is closed and deserted.
I'll try to go back again when it's more lively!

Going deeper into this lower income community.

Rather deep... (Same picture as above, different perspective)

Apparently if I want some Chinese medicine, I should go here. I was later told that somewhere back up in here is a tree that is thought to be inhabited by a spirit, and worshiped accordingly by some in the community

For anything else I could possibly need, there's this little shop.

(Skipping a few pics where I show how I manage to find my way back to the main road out of a tiny maze of dead-ends and back alleys. I was never far away from it, but in the older parts of town here the streets aren't straight, and you can't figure out how to get "there" from "here")

I said micro-community earlier because every picture so far (and all the pics in Part 2 of this post too)
are within two or three square kilometers' area. See any names you are familiar with in this pic?

Probably about 300' away from that drainage ditch, I could be somewhere in NYC.
Although I suppose that drainage ditch looked like some parts of NYC too...

Construction for the new subway line. Dapinglin's Metro line station is about to become a transfer station.

This new subway line will make things a lot more convenient for those of us out in the "suburbs" (there is no such thing as an actual suburb in Taiwan that I'm aware of, but in the sense of outlying-but-connected cities that are part of a metro area) south of Taipei City.

So that was my foray into a poorer micro-community and back. I discovered one tiny local church while in there, I am told attendance is about 10-20 people. I might try to drop by sometime later and see if my not-very-good Chinese is sufficient for a conversation!

Just for fun: Do you want to go on a similar walk? Copy and paste this into Google Maps: "台湾新北市新店區寶安街Leben Cafe 喝杯咖啡" You'll be starting more or less in the middle of where I took most of these pics. Use street view to zoom all the way in and explore the neighborhood!

CONTINUED IN PART 2...