Kelly Times Two

Last week we celebrated Christopher's adoption day, which we call Christopher Appreciation Day, so I baked about 90 cupcakes and walked to the school, holding four plastic storage containers of goodies in my arms. It's a short walk to the school, but carrying all that extra weight gets heavy, plus it started to rain. It was worth it, and the kids were happy to get some treats. I baked a yellow cake from scratch, but thought it was a bit too dense in texture. If anyone has a yellow cake recipe that they like and want to share it with me, please let me know. Two days prior, I baked a batch of chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting, which I took to my wonderful drama students who are working on the Shakespeare play. Every Wednesday night when we practice, I take some kind of treat to them. As I have mentioned previously, meeting with these incredible Taiwanese teens is the highlight of my week. They are the best youth. Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting is one of my...

Last Saturday, we went camping with Cliff and Jennifer's family and several friends from their church. We had a really nice time and the weather was perfect. Since we didn't realize that we would be camping in Taiwan, we never packed any gear to be shipped overseas. We bought a new tent and some cheap sleeping bags at the RT Mart in Hsinchu and were all set to explore the outdoors overnight. It was actually warm enough that we slept on top of the sleeping bags. Here's an action shot of everyone getting the tents set up. The campsite was essentially a narrow strip of land, someone's property that had some space for about a dozen tents and everyone's cars, plus a few tables and chairs set up in the middle area for dining and socializing. It was a cozy campsite near a small lake in a farming area on the outskirts of Hsinchu, only about twenty minutes from home. Plus a bicycle rental place was located within walking distance from our campsite where we were able to ren...

It's Friday evening and Kelly will be home from work soon and Christopher and I are just sitting in our living room having fun talking. He's playing a game on the XBox, Burnout Paradise, and I just baked some wonderful chocolate chip cookies and life is good. It's been a week since our shipment arrived, and he missed not having access to his video games and I missed my awesome kitchen tools. I've just got a few funny pictures to post tonight. Spelling here in English is inconsistent in Chinese because they normally use those complicated looking Asian characters . In fact, the town where we go to church, I have seen spelled three different ways, Jhubei, Chupei, and Zhubei. We see misspelled English words frequently, which I'm certainly not being critical of, because I would much rather see something spelled wrong in English than to have it only available in Chinese, or I would be completely lost. At the mall, I saw these "Franch" bread cookies, that caught...

Jennifer, my new friend, picked me up at our apartment on Monday at 10 am and we went to a few interesting places in Hsinchu and she helped me find a couple of businesses that I had been looking for. We had a terrific time together. Originally, she was going to take me to some traditional Taiwanese markets to grocery shop, but nothing was open on a Monday morning, so we did a bit of site seeing. This first area was on our way to the glass museum, where there were these old Japanese-style buildings in some shaded gardens. It was unclear to me what the current purpose and use of these buildings might be, but I think Jennifer mentioned that they have crafts in them on the weekends, or flowers or something. Gorgeous lotus flowers. Apparently these buildings have been around for about 300 years, which could be more easily detected from this side view, on the lower left side. To no surprise, the Hsinchu City Glass Museum was also closed since it was Monday, as was the zoo, which was right ...