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.