Taichung Trip

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Heather and I took a trip to the nearby city of Taichung this weekend. It's about 1 1/2 hours from our apartment. The scenery along the way is beautiful... the mountains rise up all around you and are often shrouded in mist. Amazing.

We started our adventure with lunch at "Herb House", an all vegetarian restaurant. These are a lot more common than you might think. Apparently many (all?) Buddhists are vegetarian. I had a "macaroni rice" dish that had a suspicious lack of macaroni. (I didn't find a single piece.) It was good though.

Them we checked out the National Museum of Natural Sciences. We were undoubtedly the oldest people there without kids. It was fun though and even us "old" folks were able to learn some cool science stuff. I will soon be attempting to make a water sphere lens for my camera. (Now were can I get my hands on a glass sphere around here? Hmm...)

An image made with a simple lens

Frozen Shadows

We then moved on to the Rain Forest Conservatory. This place is really cool. It's a giant greenhouse about 200 feet tall in the center. They have all kinds of plants that I've never seen. Some were really interesting and beautiful.

The biggest greenhouse I've ever seen

In the afternoon we checked into Chin Hua Hotel. Pretty fancy. We were pretty excited about the shower curtain and tub. No water on the floor!

That evening we went to 一中路 (Yi Jung Road). This place was nuts! There were so many people I felt like I was at a rock concert. There were tons of vendors selling food, beverages, clothes and trinkets. I picked up some sweet expanding chopsticks. Heather was more than excited to see "Salsa Mexican Soft Taco" stand. She immediatly ran to it and ordered one. It wasn't exactly what I would call authentic Mexican, but not too bad nontheless.

The chaos on Yi Jung Road

"Salsa Mexican Soft Taco"

We wrapped up the evening with some delicious barbecue from a street vendor.

A barbecue stand

The next morning we swung by CostCo, which is rather exciting because they have American food and other items that are unavailable anywere else in Taiwan. We got four bags of tortillia chips! Awesome! Sometimes it's the simple things. We decided to head home after this as a hugh typhoon was headed our way and we were hoping to beat it back to our apartment, which we did.

Overall it was a pretty exciting weekend!