Happy New Year - Family Adventure

Happy New Year!  We did not make it past midnight, we are just that entertaining that we can't even stay awake till midnight.  We also were dealing with Little M having a temperature and just not feeling good.  Thankfully his fever broke and we decided that it would be fun for the boys to take the train downtown Hsinchu.  We live probably a 5 minute drive away from downtown and we go into the downtown every day to bring Little N to school but we really don't make a habit of going down there to explore.  For one John really isn't a fan of the crowds and for two the kids get a little anxious when there are crowds of people because they get touched and people want to take pictures of them.  But we are making it our goal to make some changes in our life - one of them is getting out to see where we live and make sure the kids get used to crowds.  We live in Taiwan and crowds are a part of life.

We have a train station that is about a 5 minute walk (depending on the lights) away from us and we always talk about taking the train more but we never follow through.  With Little N having a day off from school, which I absolutely love, it made sense for us to take the train downtown.  The boys absolutely love taking the train for them there is something magical and they love watching as the buildings go by as the train moves to the next stop.

It was a very quiet day downtown because of it being a holiday so while there were people walking around there weren't as many as there could have been.  So we went into a couple of stores, walked around to see what there was and then went to an open market.  It still shocks me to see people butchering and selling meat out on the street.  They are set up on tables or carts so it's not like the meat is on the floor but just takes some getting used to.  I am very confident that I will never get used to it. John and I always talk about how we should take pictures of various things we see that are just different than what we grew up with and again this is another thing we have decided we are just going to step out of our comfort zone and ask if we can take a picture or just take the picture instead of just staying we will take it another day. The butchers were fine with me taking pictures and just kept on working like I wasn't taking their picture.

We then walked to one of the malls because Caristy wanted to check and see if one of the stores had Mountain Dew (one of the things that I miss) and when we got to the mall we saw that one of the aboriginal tribes was giving a musical performance.  The kids were fascinated by the music that they were playing.  It was really neat to listen and see.   We went to the store and found out that nope they aren't selling Mountain Dew anymore and because Little M was starting to not feel good we decided to cut our trip short and go home, we took a bus back to the train and went home where we spent the afternoon taking a nap, watching some kids movies and playing wii.  It was a nice New Year Day!