weekend highlights

Some highlights of our weekend:

- we went to a lovely park called Nan Lian Garden. My friend Jocelyn showed it to me the day we went swimming, and I wanted to come back and see it again. There's also Chi Lin nunnery attached to it that held many many Buddas. It's a really nice place to walk around. In fact, when I was there was Jocelyn, we met a man from Wisconsin who was on a six week tour of Asia. He was lagging behind the rest of the tour group taking pictures. We asked him what the best thing had been (this was his last day of the tour), so he thought about it for a bit and said that he thought this garden was the best thing he saw. I don't personally think this garden ranks over something like the Great Wall of China, but to each their own, I guess. It is pretty nice!

- Saturday was a national holiday, which is why we chose to go to Disneyland the Saturday before Annika's birthday rather than the one after. We were told it would be extra busy. It didn't seem overly busy when we were out and about, but maybe Disneyland still would have been. Anyway, that evening, we went over to our friend's place who live close to us. Their flat is on the 36 floor, so they had a great view of the fireworks that commemorated this holiday. Honestly, i'm not even sure what the holiday even was! The girls have both been scared of fireworks ever since Canada Day, but hopefully this helped change that because we were far away and they weren't noisy at all. Just really spectacular- who knows how much money had been spent on them.

- on Sunday we were feeling pretty good that we had made really good time getting out the door to go to church. We thought we'd even get there on time! Mike and Annie were sitting in the very last row on the top floor of the bus, and Leila and I were sitting in the seats in front of them. Suddenly we heard (and felt) a loud bang, and as it turns out a truck had rear-ended our bus. There was a bit of confusion, and eventually it was clear that we had to get off the bus and figure out alternate transportation. So we ended up hopping into a taxi, and then actually got to church early! I always thought the driving was crazy and wondered if accidents happen very often, so now it's a bit unnerving to know that yes, they do! We'll just hope our guardian angels will protect us while the girls take a big hiatus from being in carseats!

- a downside of the weekend (for me) was running into the leg of our couch and badly stubbing my little toe. It has since turned purple and a good part of my foot is bruised. I will spare you a picture of it, because I don't ever enjoy seeing pictures of feet. It left me limping a bit on Sunday, but it feels better already even though it still doesn't look very nice.
- we went to a mall that was beside Nan Lian Garden, and there was some kind of a big event going on. It involved babies racing each other by crawling. There seemed to be different legs of the race. We wondered if the spectators were placing bets on which baby would win? So funny!
- and finally, another typhoon has rolled in. On Sunday, level 1 was hoisted, and we were hoping it would either stay that way, or go to an 8 which would mean that school would be closed. We didn't want it to be a three, because that means that only Annie misses school, and she didn't want that. But this morning we checked, and it was a level 3. The strange thing is, the weather doesn't seem bad at all! It's overcast and breezy and that's about it! It's so strange to me that kindergarten would be cancelled, but maybe there was danger that it would get worse? Anyway, we are hoping that it will all blow over because Wednesday is another national holiday and Mike and Annie will have the day off. We'd like to do something that day, and don't want to be stuck inside with a typhoon! I guess we'll see...