July 7

I know it has been a while. I am just going to try to get the rest of these up, so they might be a little less edited than usual.

We started off the day with a trip to the Taipei public library. This place was huge! It had 11 floors to it – quite the difference from our small Pocatello library. The bottom two floors were dedicated to the children’s books, with the very bottom being all ones that were in English. We made our way down there and found children’s reading area. Rebecca and I read a few books to the younger children while Ethan found a paper airplane book and Julia and Christian found the next books in the series that they had been reading. We only spent about 30 minutes there and then we were off to the weekend flower and jade market. These markets were really fun to walk through. They were built under the freeway and so they had a little more room than some of the squishy markets we have been in. When we got to the jade market the boys wanted to buy everything! Some of the things were called “antiques” and were super expensive, but other things were more reasonably priced. They ended up each buying a small Jade frog for about $3 each. After the jade market we made our way to the President’s office. This is kind of like the White House of Taiwan. It is only open one day a month for visits, so we lucked out in the timing of things. Right now Taiwan is on maybe its 6^th or 7^th president and it is their first female president. There were a few cool rooms to see, like the press room and the banquet room, but other than that there were just some educational things mainly in Chinese. As we left we walked through a very small fruit market and one of the vendors gave us a passion fruit. We broke it open and it was so delicious. It started raining pretty hard after that, but we were able to make our way to the Land Bank Museum. This museum is really interesting, half of it about banking with a large vault that you can walk into and the other half about dinosaurs with several large skeletons. They were pretty cool to look at and it was a nice way to get out of the rain. On our way home we walked by the Chaing Kai-Shek memorial and they were having some type of military display/festival. It was still raining and we were all tired so we didn’t stay long, but the kids did get to try jumping out of an airplane with virtual reality goggles, get their picture taken with officers from different branches of the military here, and play a few more games.


At the library




The kids were impressed by the 11 floors.




A book vending machine.




At the Jade and Flower Markets








At the President's building.














Getting pictures with Taiwan's current president.




Lots of heavy rain.




In the banking museum.