June 29

We planned this to be a military day in Jilong. We had read about a park that had several old military vehicles (a couple tanks, an airplane, parts of a ship, and some huge guns) and an old fort. Problem was, they were on top of a hill about 2.5 miles away. The hill was killer in the hot sun, but we finally made it to the park. 

It was pretty cool and even though there were signs saying not to climb on the vehicles, they were all in Chinese and foreigners can’t read Chinese, right? We played around at the park for about an hour and talked to a few elderly people who were all enamored by our children. We then walked to the fort only to discover that it was under repairs for damage it had sustained in a few recent earthquakes. 

Since we were up on the top of the hillside anyway, we decided to go back to Zhongzheng Park. This was the park that we went to on our first day in Jilong, but it had been raining a lot, so we didn’t spend much time there. We took our time this time and explored all of the gigantic statues a little more. We even let Christian and Elliott pay $1.50 to ring a giant bell. He had to pull a huge beam back with a rope and then let go of it to ring it. They tried once on their own and couldn’t get it far enough back to hit the bell. So I helped them the second time. It was really loud and could be heard all around the area. 

That night we went back to the Jilong night market and found some really delicious things to try – some we had had in other places before and a couple new things.  


Playing on some of the tanks and guns.












Back to the Zhongzheng Park.














There were about 20 different statues, each with different facial expressions. This one was the grumpy statue, and it was funny because the bird liked to sit on its and only its head.




Rebecca got this wrap thing that she really liked. It was kind of like a sushi roll.




At the night market.




By this point (end of the pineapple season) pineapples were really cheap - We were getting them for about 50 cents a piece.







The sign here in English says "nutritious sandwich"




It was really good, but definitely not nutritious. It had hard-boiled eggs and salami meat and pickles and tomatoes (all those are nutritious I guess). But then they deep fry the bread and slather on a ton of mayonnaise. 




We didn't try this, but we loved seeing the whole pig out at this station. It seemed like they would have a new pig every night, and then just sell it until they were out of meat for that night. You could pick whatever slice you wanted of what was left of it.




These buns were pretty good. They were just like the steamed buns with meat inside, except they baked them in this barrel oven thing.





This was probably one of my favorite dishes for our trip to Taiwan. I never had it when I was a missionary. It was kind of like two thick pancakes with peanut butter in between. That doesn't sound all that spectacular, but it was really really good.