July 4

Happy Independence Day! We knew it would be hard to have real Independence Day celebrations while we were in Taiwan, but we tried to plan a few American things to do. 

Our big plan for the day was to go to Costco and have a pizza feast. As I looked up the directions I saw that there were some baseball fields on the way and as we were walking there they just happened to have some games going on. We stopped and watched a few innings of one of the games as that seemed to be the very American thing to do. It was fun to watch them play for a while. I think they were high school level students. It seemed like they were very invested in the game (they were cheering for each other and things like that), but I was very impressed by their sportsmanship (they were still smiling as they walked off the field after getting thrown out at a base, no one made any complaints about the referees calls even when he called some clear balls as strikes, no one got upset when they struck out, and there were not even any complaints or negative talk when a couple of batters got hit by the ball). 

After that we made our way to Costco. There, we ended up getting two full pizzas (one Hawaiian and one supreme) and ate every single piece. We were supposed to catch the bus home, but I forgot to look up what bus number we needed to catch. So instead, we had to do the three mile walk back. Although none of us wanted to do that, the children didn’t complain very much and it was a good way to work off our calories. 

We finished the night by watching Back to the Future. We figured that would be a good movie for American culture. The children all loved it. In general I thought it was a good movie for them, but it had more swearing in it than I remembered and a scene where the dad, when he was a teenager, was being a peeping tom. It is a movie that I wish we could get an edited copy of sometime.

At the baseball game.




A temple that we stopped by on our way to Costco.












A different and cool playset that we found on our way to Costco.






Excited about the pizza!