chillin' on the couch

We spent the day cleaning in anticipation of my friend Dawn arriving. We did go to the Indian Restaurant for dinner, yum. The place is called 'Indian Restaurant".

no more corn pleaz

I am on my third day of eating Pizza Hut pizza and it is now indisputable that corn and peas on pizza is gross. The best evidence that I have for this is the fact that I am on my third day of eating Pizza Hut pizza and if it wasn't gross Tim would have finished this two days ago. I don't have any new photos of Torben so I'll put up one from the other day at the beach. God, he is cute.

please let me in...

Here is Torben unhappily on the other side of the baby barrier.

Pizza Hut

This picture is for Ken. It seems like everytime we are on vacation with the Jaglinski's at some point in the trip you can count on Ken saying "why don't we get a pizza from Pizza hut?" I remember hearing those words in Leadville Colorado and also in Vancouver Canada. I am sure there were other times, but those two occassions immedately come to mind. I was in charge of getting food last night and I suggest we get Rice burgers. A rice burger is a burger but instead of a bread bun the bun is made out of rice, like formed rice. I really didn't understand it until I actually ate one. I had a chicken rice burger and it was delicious. I got my rice burger from a breakfast place called LaGuardia and that place only stays open until 12:30 so it was long closed, but I had seen another place advertizing rice burgers around the corner. I walked over there and either the place was closed or it had changed into a new place. Next door was pizza hut. I decided to go with the pizza hut. I got a mexican pizza and a veggie pizza. I read the toppings list for the Mexican and it had onions sausage and pepperoni and then jalapeno peppers, I think the jalapenos were what made it 'mexican'. I didn't even bother to look at the veggie list - all I knew is it wasn't the pizza hut kim chi pizza or the japanese takiyoki pizza(???). The 'veggie' was bizarre, topping included corn, peas, pinnapple and mushrooms. Torben really seemed to enjoy the leftovers today for lunch.

picture of the day

If you put a bowl down on the floor you have to expect Torben to sit in it.

next week

Next week I am meeting up with my friend Dawn and we are traveling to China. We still have no idea where we are going to go, and this has caused us much stress. I am writing this because 1. I probably won't update the blog while I'm gone, 2. Dawn said something really funny to me and I wanted to share. While we were discussing where we might go she said "just so you know, I am not really crazy about huge cities" Do you know how many millions 1.2 billion is? It is 1200. One thousand and two hundred million. Have you ever heard of Chengdu? How about Xian? Both of the those cites, you've probbly never heard of have larger populations than London (Chengdu, 13 mil and Xian, 10 million). I am pretty sure it is going to really hard to avoid huge cities in China.

Sand is better than pig's feet

On Sunday we took a trip to the beach, Torben sure loves sand! He ate handfuls of it, eventually I gave up on trying to stop him. Who knows, maybe it's good for him. He seems to digest it just fine. After we stopped at the beach we headed back to Tainan...but had some lunch on the way. Yun-che ordered. We are still not sure what he was thinking, maybe he was thinking 'to hell with these foreigners, I love pig's feet so I'm ordering pig's feet". We also had soup with various pig products in it. It is a good thing I wasn't very hungry. I blame my pickiness on my mother for forcing me to eat liver when I was young...because now I refuse to eat anything that is at all 'organ' related. Last night we got take out from 'Mexico to go' which is a little mexican food stand not far from the apartment. We got burritos from there once and Tim thought they were awful. I was quite pleased with my chicken taco salad. This time I told Tim 'don't think of it as Mexican food, think of it as NOT Chinese food'. We got a mini mexican pizza (?), I got a delightful chicken taco salad and Tim got the chicken taco dinner. He had a big change of heart on 'Mexico to go' and I think we'll be getting food from there again, maybe even in a couple of days.

KongLong

We made it to Kaushiong this past weekend. We got there on Saturday afternoon and checked into the hotel and then went for a nice swim in the lovely pool. After a short nap, we all took a walk along Love River. Here is Torben and Tim in from of the fish dragon statue on the riverwalk on Love river, downtown Kaushiong.

more monkey biz

We are getting ready to go down to Kauhsuing for the weekend. There should be lots ot report when we return so stay tuned to T-monkey.

Monkey biz as usual

Photo taken right before Torben successfully got finger prints all over my camera lens - bummer.
After shower pix.

at the lab

We stopped by Tim’s work today to see the lab and see the BVS. Torben enjoyed testing the delta ratio and the negative stiffness of barium titianate but not nearly as much as he enjoyed pushing around the chairs in the lab.

After the experiments we all went to lunch.

Dooby time

Grace gave Torben this little drinking bottle and Torben just learned how to hold it and drink out of the straw. You can drink from it from any angle and it doesn’t spill when held upside down. The label on the bottle says ‘dooby’, which Tim and I think is really funny because we can now ask Torben where his ‘dooby’ is and to go find his ‘dooby’. One of the downsides is now he wants to drink out of anything that looks like a straw. He is now trying to drink out of the baby bottle too but doesn’t understand he needs to hold it up to get anything out of it. Hard concept to explain. Anyhow, here is a couple of pix with the ‘dooby’.

Moon festival dinner

The plan for dinner was to go to a traditional Taiwanese restaurant. Because of Moon Festival we couldn’t get reservations anywhere so Yunche just picked a place – sushi, which normally would have been great but we had just had sushi for lunch and sushi for lunch yesterday, good thing I like sushi. It was a nice dinner and Torben spent most of the time with the waitresses who passed him around the whole time. They loved him.

After dinner we stopped at a street fair which had a puppet show. According to Yun-che the puppet show was for "the Gods", which was probably true because no one else was watching it.

Chichan (chicken) Towers

It was nice out today. We went to Chihken Towers, an old Dutch fort that was later made into a temple and garden. It sounds sort of like Chicken Towers so eventually it just became Chicken Towers, much easier to remember! It was quite stunning. While we enjoyed the sights the tourist enjoyed Torben. At one point one of the tour groups was surrounding him (close to 50 people) and when one woman put out her arms and Torben reached for her so she could hold him, the crowd cheered. I was down stairs in the fort while Tim and Torben were up in the tower so I only heard about all this second hand. Later Torben had fun climbing the stairs – again with a small crowd cheering him on to get to the top. He made it.

Yue Festival

Last night our apartment complex had KaoRou (bar b que) in celebration of Moon Festival. There was a live band and free drinks. We each got 4 drink tickets and Tim was pretty psyched about that assuming it meant beer. It meant tea. I was pretty excited about the tea. I love the tea here, you can get it anywhere - one out of every ten stores is a tea stand. There are many different tea chains, my favorite is ‘Tea and hMake Hand’. I am systematically going through their menu; I know column 1 is Red tea (or black tea) and column 2 is green tea and column 3 is Oolong tea. It seems the farther down the columns you go the more complex the tea becomes (ie tea with coconut milk, tea with lime and coconut milk, tea w/ lemon etc). Each column is probably 20 rows long so many different combinations of tea available. You order by size and then how much sugar you want. Sugar can be ordered at 10 different levels. I like level 3. You can also order what level of ice you prefer. I like a lot of ice but that is difficult to communicate so just let that one go. Sugar is easy...they ask a question or point to a little sign that has different numbers on it and I respond by holding up three fingers. With sugar I usually get what I want. Sometimes I go to other tea stands and then I have to guess at what kind of tea I am going to get and many times the result can be less than yummy. Today I got fruit tea ( that part was in English, which was unusual), sounds good doesn’t it? It was really gross, sort of salty sweet, Tim got it too, we were both very disapointed. Anyhow that what the drinks were at Kao Rou -- tea. We stayed for a while at the apartment KaoRou and Torben had fun running around with all the other kids. Eventually he got overwhelmed being easily the youngest of them all. There was also a lottery and Tim and I practiced at guessing what the numbers where being announced. We both know 1-6 and 8, but 7 and 9, are still a mystery. Our number was 624, or what sounds like ‘leo’, ‘er’, ‘se’, I don’t think we won anything but you can never be sure. Reading of the numbers took forever but everyone seemed really excited about it, which probably has something to do with ‘luck’, luck is big here. All in all, it was a nice little celebration. We chatted with a few of the neighbors (not really).

Immune system building boot camp, week 2

Torben got sick again, this time there was lots of throw up. Little babies are funny when they throw up because they don't 'get' it' to contain the throw up, they just throw up anywhere. He threw up in his little baby tent during the night, have you seen the baby tent? Here he is in it, after it was washed throughly. He puked then rolled around in it for what seemed like only seconds but by the time we got to him, he was covered in the stuff. Poor kid. We took him back to the doctor, he got some medication and he was better by the following evening.