So I’ve been spending the break away fr…

So I’ve been spending the break away from the girls =P but (!) I’m in Taipei, where I haven’t been for 7 years =(. Even though it’s been raining non-stop here, I’ve been having a great time. Food in Taiwan is AWESOME. My cousin and his wife celebrated their 9th wedding anniversary yesterday and my mum bought them a cake. It was chocolate, with alternating layers of fruit filling and pudding filling, with whipped cream frosting on the outside. Where in the U.S. are you going to find a Taiwanese style cake with pudding on the inside!!

If you’re in Taipei, and you have an opportunity to go to the Flora Expo, definitely hit up the 夢想館 (dream pavilion) and the 環保館 (eco-friendly pavilion). I wish I had brought my camera with me to take pictures of the Flora Expo, but all I can do is tell you what it’s all about. The first stop in the Dream Pavilion is to admire a large paper flower hanging from the ceiling that has various degrees of movement and weighs 3000g. Afterward you make a wish in front of one of their graphic stations, and depending on what you wish for (love, health, fortune, etc ..) you get a colored bracelet. In the next room, there are 3D graphic screens of flora, with stations that light up when they’re ready for you to harvest “flowers”. You match your bracelet up to the flashing light on the ground and harvest different flowers from different stations.

Moving on to the next room, you pat stamen like protrusions hanging down from the ceiling, to release and harvest pollen. Afterward you follow the footsteps past another graphic screen where you turn from human into insect (I was an ant). Then you wave your hands in the air, and on the screen, these things (I didn’t quite understand what they were) that help you with your pollen cluster around where you’re standing in front of the screen. Together with a group of people, you put your hands on a large globe which lights up and gathers your pollen. Then the opposite screen yields a landscape image, and then you proceed onto the next room. The next room holds a circular movie screen where a animated screening of landmarks and landscapes in Taiwan play out. After you watch the movie, and get to play with fairies on the screen, you move on to stations where you harvest your flowers, and at the end you get a print out of your own unique flower.

The outside of the Eco-Friendly Pavilion is made up of panels of recycled plastic bottles. It uses natural resources for heating and cooling down. To cool down, water streams down from the side of the building, and all water used in the Eco-Friendly Pavilion is recycled water. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to catch a runway show of the garments created with green materials that are displayed inside the Pavilion.