Science, Parks, & Sun Moon Lake

So we had a very, very busy last weekend in Taiwan.  The last weekend had been left open from the start (the only weekend for which we didn't have plans arranged by the school), so we decided to use it to enjoy a few things that we hadn't gotten to do yet.  After tossing around a few places that I'm sure would have been amazing but also would have been very hard to get to and cost a small fortune, the answer was practically decided for us.  The family that was going to take us to Sun Moon Lake, a very mountain lake and resort area, had to cancel last weekend, so we decided to go there for a day.  When we told Jenny, another teacher, about our plan, she decided to come, too.  Then, some other conversations happened that we didn't exactly know about.  Anyways, long story short, we ended up taking two cars, eight adults, and one 4 year old.  I'm getting ahead of myself, though.  The trip to Sun Moon Lake was on Sunday.  Since that had become more of a group trip, Maura and I decided to spend Saturday alone in Taichung.  We went to the National Science Museum several weeks ago, and were a bit underwhelmed with what we saw.  It was more for kids, and there was very little English.  We also didn't leave ourselves enough time for the exhibit halls, however, which was a separate admission.  We decided to go to those exhibit halls on Friday, followed by a bus ride to Taichung Park in the evening.  The exhibit halls were pretty great, especially the large section of dinosaur fossils/animatronic dinosaur robots.  Don't take my word for it; here are some pictures:

This was in the entrance to the museum.

There were three sauropod (I think) skeletons in a circular courtyard in the middle of the museum.

See?

This is a giant squid.  Maura was not impressed.

This was from a section on Chinese innovation.  This device is actually an ancient seismograph.  The information was all in Chinese, but the best we could understand is that those dragons all have little marbles in their mouths, and movement in the Earth causes them to fall into the frogs below, indicating the direction of the movement.  We could be way off on that.

There was a section on Chinese medicine, including this outdoor herb garden.

I'm pretty sure that this T-Rex was sneezing on the velociraptor in front of it.

Woops.  I meant that the T-Rex was awesomely attacking the velociraptor...not sneezing.  Sorry, Mr. T-Rex.

This museum appears to have kept up with the times well.

This canoe is from an exhibit on the aboriginal people of Taiwan.

Maura fearlessly inserted herself into the middle of a fearsome fossil fight for a fantastic photo op.

One of the special exhibits at the museum contained a bunch of oversized duplicates of famous artworks and let you pose as part of them.  I don't know why it was in the museum of science, but we had some fun with it.

Maura invented sunglasses.

I'm hoping a talent agent sees this photo and realizes my comedic potential.

After the museum, we went to a restaurant called Ponderosa, and we ate at their buffet.  It's apparently an American chain steakhouse, but I had never heard of it before coming here.  The food was definitely not the highest quality, but they had fruits, vegetables and iced tea, so we filled up on those.  When we finished, we got on the bus headed to Taichung Park.  It was pretty dark by the time we got there, and my camera battery was just about dead.  The park was really nice, consisting of a small pond, several bridges, and the Lake Heart Pavilion, which Taichung has adopted as it's city logo (weird wording for that?).  There was also a hill in back with a few buildings on it, and a HUGE statue of three goats - owing to the total randomness and crazy size of said statue, along with the fact that my camera died as I tried to take a picture of it, I'm not ruling out that Maura and I shared a hallucination, possibly as a result of the "popcorn chicken" at Ponderosa.  Here are the pictures that I was able to take at the park:

There were other pictures of Maura on this bridge, but every darn one of them came out blurry.  This one is much darker than them, but at least you can see Maura in it.

This was taken from the Lake Heart Pavilion, which is built in the middle of the pond.

Also from the park.

We got on the bus and headed back to the school, finishing our very full day at 8:30.  We were getting up early for Sun Moon Lake in the morning, so we figured that going to bed early was a pretty good idea.  Just as we got back to the school, though, the phone that the school gave me for emergencies rang.  It was a teacher named Emmett, asking me if we wanted to play (play is a weirdly translated word; people also asked us what we played in Hong Kong).  We figured, "Why not?", and got ready to go out to who knows where.  I was ready for a basketball game or video games, but it turns out that the father of one of the kids at school was around and wanted to hang out, so we went and did that at a tea restaurant with him, Emmett, Joy, and another teacher named Fran.  We had tea, appetizers, and played some card games.  Maura even hurt her finger stabbing the father while playing a game that resembled Slap Jack.  We had fun, although we stayed out really late and didn't get to bed (we still hadn't showered from our day of walking a few miles in 95 degree humidity) until 2:00 am.  That's it for Saturday, and I'll continue Sunday and Sun Moon Lake in a second post.

Oops, I almost forgot...before the tea restaurant, we went to a nice, new park called the Maple Garden.  Here are a couple of pictures from the Maple Garden.

The park was this winding walkway around a man-made pond at the bottom of a dug-out valley in the middle of the city.

This is in a very nice part of the city, so the buildings surrounding the park are all new, colorful, and clean-looking.

There was really no wind to speak of, which was unfortunate with the heat, but made for some nice reflective pictures.

This came out blurry, but from left to right: Me, Maura, Joy, Fran, Eric (the father), and Emmett.