July 21

Only a couple more days left in Taiwan L We are really excited to get back to our life in America, but it is also sad to know that this adventure will soon end. We did everything that we wanted to do while in Taiwan, but we will miss the food and the people and getting to spend so much time together as a family. Rebecca and I wanted to get in one more visit to the temple before we left, so this was our last day to do it. The temple here has sessions on Saturday every hour, but only from 7am to 3pm. I woke up a little early and went to the 7am session. Rebecca and the children met me at the temple after that. From there we walked over to the Jade Market again. The boys bought some frogs that croak when you run a wooden stick along their backs. We have seen those all over the place and know they are not unique to Taiwan, but the boys wanted to use their own money on them so we let them. After that, we made our way over to the big park for one last time playing on the toys. It was so hot and especially humid from all the rain that happened last night and in the morning, so we didn’t stay long. In fact, right when we sat down a skating group came up to us and asked if they could give our kids free rollerblading lessons. They took about 10 minutes to strap the kids all up and then the lessons were only 10 minutes long. After that, they tried to sell me on a paid 30 minute lesson, but I told them we were not interested. Instead of playing at the park any longer, we decided to go to the library. We had stopped by the library a couple weeks ago and the children had been asking to go back ever since. We spent a couple hours there reading books – they had a whole large section that was dedicated to English children’s books. On the way to taking Rebecca back to the temple we stopped by to get shaved ice for one last time. Rebecca got a mango shaved ice and I got the regular where I picked my toppings and the children got to pick whose they wanted to eat from. Luckily most of them ate with Rebecca! During Rebecca’s temple session we played at a park a bit until it started raining, and then we made our way back to the Chaing Kai-Shek Memorial Park. They have a lot of covered walkways there, so we were able to keep pretty dry, but still move around. That evening, the children ate the scallion pancakes with egg and bacon and Rebecca and I got beef noodle soup. So we tried to take it easy and get in a lot of our favorites today, which was kind of sad knowing it would be our last time eating those things and going to those places.

Just a couple pictures at the park. A group was there providing roller blading lessons. They spent about 15 minutes getting the roller blades on the children and then about 10 minutes for the lesson. Elliott really only got about 5 minutes because he was paired up with Agnes - he was pretty sad about that.