No More typhooning!!

So after a long weekend of having to stay in because of the typhoon, we all got out and did as much as we could! As a result, we were all VERY tired, and a few of us got colds... not fun, but I know I'm at least feeling a lot better today!

On Wednesday we spent the afternoon with our Culture class at the National Palace Museum. This isn't the national palace of Taiwan, but it's a replica of the National Palace in China, and during the Sino-Japanese war the Emperor there was afraid of having all the great works of art, and beautiful possessions destroyed so he had a place built in Taiwan to hold it all! The museum holds over 650,000 pieces of artwork, and is the biggest collection of Chinese art in the WORLD! Needless to say, we did NOT see it all!

This is the outside of the Museum, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, so unfortunately I don't have any pictures of what we saw :( Google: "White Cabbage National Palace Museum" though and you can see one of there most valulable pieces. It was all made of ONE piece of jade with leaves and small crickets to represent fertility on it.

Abby and I in front of one of the dragons guarding all the art!

(L-R Kayla, Me, and Carly!)

There was a beautiful orchid down where we were waiting for everyone else, so we took lots of pictures in front of it!!

(L-R Annabelle, Me, Ariel)

The HUGE koi eating in the pond. There was a BEAUTIFUL little garden right next to the museum. Huge black swans!

A Gate at the Garden

After the museum, we went out to the Shilin Night market again and had dinner. Lots of the students came with us and they kept buying food off the carts for us to try!

This is a very nice woman making my dinner at her cart. It was a VERY spicy Thai chopped salad. With Papaya, peppers, peanuts, lime, tomatoes, and fish sauce! REALLY good, but my lips were on fire after a few bites!

This is Sabrina and I having dessert! She's eating some kind of pudding with Jellies, and I am eating Soy Milk Ice with Mangos! The mangos were very sweet, and really good! in between dinner and dessert I tried, fried shrimp with pineapple (it also had some kind of frosting and sprinkles on it), Cranberry Juice (which was REALLY good, I drank a huge cup!), Some pork skewered with green onion (too hot to really enjoy), a VERY cheesy baked potato (again, VERY hot, but good!), and some sort of tea with Jellies in it. The students are all so generous, and SUCH good hosts! They love taking us places and watching our faces as we try new things!

The next night we all went to this little town called, Danshue. It's along a waterfront, and there's lots of little tourisy shops to find good gifts at, and fun places to see. It reminds me a lot of Lincoln City back home! I took this video of a little man playing some traditional chinese instrument. We wanted to take pictures with him, which he was eager to let us do, and he gave us his instrument to play when we took them, but we didn't sound nearly as good.

We ate dinner at this restuarant that had more traditional chinese food. I ate pig intestines, tofu, bamboo, sweet and sour pork (which reminded me of home!), hollow green vegetables (sort of like spinach), shrimp, and these "Taiwanese fries"! They are little sardines that are fried in batter. They taste like fishy fries... I couldn't decided whether I liked them or not, lol.

There are silly little claw machines like the ones we have in the US EVERYWHERE here. There are entire places that are just these little machines, and most of them have creepy toys like this one!