Babel School in Taiwan

Yes, you read it right Conference on Nuclear Medicine. What do we have to do with that? Well ... it so happened that Zosia was invited to give a presentation at this conference. But why? What has she got to do with medicine and nuclear medicine? What is nuclear medicine? Well ... let's start from the beginning. In December my childhood friend wrote me that he will be coming with a brief visit to Taiwan to attend a conference. I offered to show him around if he stayed a few days longer. Later it turned out that he mentioned our family to the conference organizers and they contacted us. They watched some interviews with Zosia and were really impressed with what she has achieved at such a young age. And so they contacted us and asked Zosia to give a short, 30 min., motivational talk to the conference attendees. The organizers wanted her so badly that they even paid for her ticket to/from Taiwan (she flew from Japan to attend the conference). Too bad Tim was not in Taiwan at that ...

Lugang 鹿港 is one of our favourite places to visit. Whenever guests from abroad come and they have more than just a few days in Taiwan, we take them to Lugang. It's an old city in the central Taiwan, near Changhua 彰化. In the old area of the city there are many temples, shops and narrow streets with vendors selling yummy food. This time our visit was quite quick, just 2 hours or so, so we didn't visit all the places we usually go to. We did stop by Mazu Temple (Tianhou 天后宮) . This temple was build in the late Ming-early Qing dynasty in order to worship the Taoist Goddess of the Sea, Mazu 媽祖. In the late 17th century one of the generals took the statue of Mazu from Meizhou 湄洲 in China to protect his ships in the voyage across the Taiwan Strait and relocated it to Taiwan where a temple to house the statue was build. The temple has three main buildings - front, main and rear halls - there are two courtyards. It is considered as one of Taiwan's finest architectural works bec...

This time nature class walk has taken us to another mountain in Taipei. Before the class the teacher warned us that there will be many stairs to climb and ... there really were MANY STAIRS. Jiantan Mountain 劍潭山 is located behind the famous Grand Hotel in the northern part of Taipei. There are a few places to start the hike, one is right next to the bowling alley opposite the Jiantan MRT Station and the other a bit further up the road from the MRT. We started our hike from the bowling alley (where I could conveniently park my car).  The beginning of the walk was not exciting as they have covered most of the slope with cement and metal nets so as to prevent land slides. Stairs, stairs and even ... ... more stairs, that was the theme of the day.  On the way up we passed a few kinda of run down volleyball (?) courts, two forgotten cuddly toys, a few old bunkers and military posts, a nice area to exercise or rest, a big t...