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As I mentioned in earlier travelogue posts from this trip, Cherry and I spent a lot of time in pretty miserable condition on this vacation. I was sick for most of the week we spent in Wuxi, but it sucked pretty bad that Cherry was sick for most of her first visit to Taiwan. As a result of her illness, we opted out of the family trip that we had planned to go on across the northern part of the island and stayed at my grandparents' house for those few days:
Wide angle shot overlooking Taoyuan
Rocking the facemasks on the rooftops of Taoyuan
Fifi tried her feet at the river rock foot exercise that is very popular in Taiwan - supposedly walking over these stones stimulates your blood flow
Ouch!!! That didn't take long!
After my parents returned from the trip, they took us to Taipei to visit the Palace Museum. This famous museum contains a majority of the Imperial collection from the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing dynasty. This is because, when Chiang Kai-Shek fled to Taiwan following the Chinese Civil War, he made sure to take as many national treasures with him. In hindsight, this turned out to be a great decision, because doubtless many of these treasures would have fallen victim to the Cultural Revolution a few decades after his retreat. Thus, Taipei's Palace Museum has among the largest, if not the absolute largest, collection of historical Chinese artifacts in the world, although in recent years, Chinese museums such as the amazing Shanghai Museum have amassed very impressive collections as well.
Unfortunately, unlike the Shanghai Museum, Taipei's Palace Museum is not a free destination, nor do they allow you to take photos inside any of the exhibits, so we only have some photos of the structures and gardens outside, which are still quite nice:
Fifi helping with a meal when Grandma came back
Waiting for the train to Taipei
Statue of the revered Dr. Sun Yat-Sen
I like this shot because I was able to get a little bit of bokeh out of my point-and-shoot! Plus Fifi looks so cute!
A bronze ding vessel
The gate to the garden, which used to be the home of a famous poet before he donated it to the museum grounds
Cool multiple focal points shot
Fifi with aunt Melinda and her friend, Vivian
After leaving the museum, we decided to take advantage of our stay in Taipei to visit the Taipei 101, the tallest building in east Asia (and briefly the tallest building in the world):
Not my shot, but it shows you some perspective on the height of this thing...
Eating some famous Taiwan Beef Noodles at the Taipei 101
That is a "Damper Baby", a mascot of the Taipei 101 which represents the sophisticated damper designed into the tower. More on that later!
Shot from the interior observation deck
I wish I had a tripod for these shots...
Eating ice cream on the upper outdoor observation deck
The tower spire
This night shot came out pretty good, even without a tripod!
The Taipei 101 features the world's fastest elevator!
The real damper. This big ball sways during earthquakes, helping the building to maintain stability, and is a key innovation of the super skyscraper.
One of Taiwan's special products are these elaborate sculptures fashioned from coral. Taiwanese coral is highly prized and could be considered a modern equivalent of jade
Click this photo for the higher resolution version to see the detail in the sculpture!
The elevator speedometer. We didn't hit 1010 m/m - but we made it past 600 m/m! Enough to make your ears pop!
Stay tuned for more travelogues of our latest trip to Asia!
This year's Thanksgiving was a little hectic at the beginning. Because Ed's new job as a photographer at a theme park affords him extra dough to work during holidays, we did not get together at my parents house as originally planned. Instead, Mom, Dad, and Melinda came over to our house for a turkey dinner. As we've done in years past, we opted to go for Publix's pre-cooked turkey, which is a pretty good deal for $40, including a 12-pound turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, and cranberry/orange relish:
We set up a mini-Christmas tree!
Grandpa carving the turkey
Rounding out the spread: some stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, and cranberry sauce courtesy of Publix as well as green beans and cabbage added by Cherry for some vegetable goodness
We ended up with quite a lot of leftovers, which I later on in the weekend used to whip together this awesome culinary creation:
I call it the Thanksgiving Leftover Po' Boy Sammich! Turkey, Stuffing, Mashed Potatoes, Gravy, Cheese, and Cranberry Sauce over French Bread
The next morning, Fifi made a huge milestone by taking a trip all by her self! Well, technically, it was with my parents and Melinda, but it was her first trip anywhere without Mommy and Daddy, and by far her longest experience without our company. Earlier in the year, we had left her to stay with Cherry's mom while we went to dinner with some of Cherry's dad's friends, but that was only for a little under 3 hours. On this particular trip, my parents took Sofia all the way to Orlando to see Uncle Ed, and then went shopping! All in all, Fifi was gone for almost nine hours!
Singing in the car on the way to Orlando
To take advantage, Cherry and I headed to our first date in over two years to the movie theater to catch the last installment of the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn Part 2. At first, we were all excited about our first date sans-Fifi:
But, after the movie, which was light years better than the first part of Breaking Dawn (basically a two hour documentary about giving birth to a half-vampire, half-human baby) and thus made it at least seem like a reasonably good movie, Cherry felt really lonely so she took a long nap. When we got up, we called my parents, who informed me that Fifi was doing just fine and had a great time! However, once Fifi got a chance to talk to us, she started to miss us and cried for most of the time on the trip back home before falling asleep in the car:
Fifi fell asleep in the car, but was clearly still homesick in her dreams...
Grandma, Grandpa, and Melinda went home early the next day, so we took some group photos:
Afterwards, we caught the best UF-FSU game that has been played for the past three years (mostly because the Gators lost the previous two!) only to watch Lame Kitten not get it done against Notre Dame, virtually eliminating our chance at another BCS championship shot this year.
Sunday was a pretty quiet day as we unwinded and got ready to go back to our regular schedule. We did however get a chance to take Fifi to the playground again, where she made some new friends!
I like taking "golden hour" shots
Testing a new photo app on my phone that lets me zoom in up to 11x. This shot was at about 5x, taken from the ground. I plan to do a Nokia mobile phone rant post one of these days, but I'm way behind on my China/Taiwan 2012 travelogue posts as it is...
