Can Plants

One day a couple months ago I was grocery shopping and I saw a display of some plants that grow, from seed, out of a can.  They looked cool and were pretty cheap so I bought some.  They were a great buy!

I love growing seeds because I feel like they're always a bit of a surprise.  Here's a picture from right after they sprouted.  The one on the left is an "impatient."  In the middle is a "music plant."  And at the end is the aptly named "magic bean."

If you click on the picture, you can see the the "magic bean" says "thank you."  

Can you see why they call it a "magic bean?"  It's crazy.  Every day I go in to see them it has gotten longer and has moved around to face a different direction.

Here's what the other two currently look like.  I hope the impatient gets flowers before we leave, but it probably won't.

If I keep posting roughly once a day, I'll be caught up in no time!

Lion's Baseball!

Baseball is big in Taiwan and Tainan has it's own team - the Lions.  I have no idea how the leagues work in Taiwan or how good the Lions are.  But, a few weeks ago Tom and I went to a Lion's game with some other families in our ward.  It was great!  I'm pretty sure our team won, too.

Here are some things that are different about baseball games in Taiwan:

1.) Instead of a band or pop music over a loud speaker, they use live drums.  They also use these plastic things that you can wave or smack together and everyone knows the beats and moves and yells the cheers in unison.  The cheers got stuck in our heads for days.

2.) Instead of having someone do pushups or firing a canon or doing fireworks when points are scored they wave these great big fans.

3.) The food.  While they have Taiwanese hotdogs and popcorn, they also have lots of other funky things.

Here are a couple of photos.

Tom talking to one of the guys in the ward, Brother VanCott, about investing.

GOOOOO Lions!!!  Jiayo!  Jiayo!  Jiayo!

Flower Exposition

Boo.  For the zillionth time, I spent forever writing up this post, only to have it deleted by blogger.  I pressed "publish" and it gave me an error message and then wouldn't even let me log in for the next day or so. 

As a result, the post will be much abridged.  Basically, we went to Taipei a few weekends ago with our ward for a temple trip.  The temple was great!  We went to Taipei 101's food court a couple times and had fabulous food, were minimally instrumental in returning a young child to her parents and, as the title of this post indicates, we went to the floral expo.  It wasn't all we'd hope it would be and was mostly boring displays, but was hugely crowded.  The only redeeming quality was the bizarre parade we stumbled across at the end.

The next couple photos are evidence of how crowded it was.  The first is the line in front of us and the second is the line behind us.

Also, my friend Heather came and joined us for most of the time, which was great because I really needed some fun conversation to liven up the experience!

This display supposedly represented America, but focused mostly on Idaho spuds.  A decent amount of people were also lined up to take photos wearing cowboy hats.

One area had a couple of nice bonsais.

Just after taking this photo, some people who had clearly been ogling us asked to take a picture not with us, but of us.  As if there aren't tons of picture of white people on the internet and on billboards.  But eh, I'm sure we'll miss it when we get back.

Creepy or not, we sometimes take photos of adorable kids.  If Tom and I could give birth to an asian baby, we would.

At the floral expo, as in Tainan, Christmas trees are still totally accepted decoration.

Now comes the parade photos.  As you look at these you should imagine "It's a Small World" in Chinese playing in the background....over and over.

So, that's the Expo!  And the Taipei trip!  As a side note, in the middle of the night before taking the train back, I threw up big time.  Then again after I got up, then again once we were back in Tainan.  Great way to end the trip!

Anping Fort

On Feb. 19th, we decided to go check out this old fortress that we'd seen when we were renting bikes for this bike trip.  It was pretty cool.  Not spectacular, but cool.  Here are the photos.

They built (in modern times) a tower that you can climb that has some good views of the city.  We noticed that not too far away there was this massive, crazy looking cemetery.  You can see it in the photos below.

These flowers were growing on top of the brick wall that's in the first picture.

These next few were taken by Tom, who is beginning to take my camera more and more often.  I pretend to be annoyed, but am secretly quite proud of him.  While he was taking these I was checking out some cookbooks in the visitor's center that had recipes for night market and side stall food, which I thought was great.  I bought one, partly to cook some things I like and partly just to show people back home.

After we were done with the fortress we decided to go check out the cemetery.  You couldn't really walk inside though, without stepping on things you shouldn't step on.

The walk to the cemetery took us through a neat alleyway.  In truth, Tainan alleyways are often neat.

Note the popcorn hanging from the fence.  Decoration?

I can't explain it, but this apartment area seemed so much more homey than most here.  It reminded me a bit of home, with the grass.  It just felt better.

On our way home we stopped by a park to play a little catch, then played around with the exercise / playground equipment.  This old lady came over and we had a whole conversation together in our respective languages.  We gathered that she really liked me, she thought I was strong (due to my antics on the equipment I suppose) and she was worried that I was cold.  I can't remember what else.  But she was so cool and so nice!  I'm going to miss people like that when we go back to the states, because the people here are ABSOLUTELY nicer.  No question.