You are not in Kansas anymore Day 2

Umbrella stand - Almost, if not all shops, restaurant, offices have an umbrella stand in their front door. This is especially helpful during times when it continues to rain for days. It will help keep the restaurants dry. One thing that is always on my mind - there has never have any umbrellas being stolen!

You are not in Kansas anymore Day 1

Arrived in Taiwan on Monday evening.... I was talking to Hannah what should I be posting about on this trip. On the first trip, I have photos of everything about the lab and Taipei (in general)... second trip - the theme is "food"... the previous trip Hannah took over and blog about her adventure here in Taiwan. So this time, I think I am going to do a photo blog once a day on simple things you don't get much in US or NZ - theme is call "You are not in Kansas anymore" :)

Day 1 - As far as my experience goes, Taiwan is the only place you can get a meal complete with rice, chicken chop, and 3 selection of vegetables for NT60 (NZD 3, USD 3.5). I usually get my lunch at this small shop call "Three meals" near the Academia Sinica lab. The girls in the lab said it is not healthy because they used too much oil, and they are suspicious of the cheap food, but the guys in the lab are more concerned with saving a couple of dollars! :)

Stuffy, snuffy, snorty

Well, there goes the weekend plan of going shore diving today. It was the most beautiful day of the whole 2 weeks! No rain, great sunshine, slightly warm (for winter at least), and the water is so calm - there wasn't any slight of wind. However, here we are at home, both of us sick... the main culprit are as always the students, then passing the virus to me, and finally to Hannah. So, instead of diving, we are at home, being miserable. At least, I do not have the excuse of not able to find time to BLAST my bacteria sequences on ncbi (National Center for Biotechnology Information) website.

This month (May) is going to be a busy month with working on two weekends of field trips, tutoring and demonstrating for first year labs, writing papers, analysing data, and preparing for the research trip to Taiwan in June.

Time flies by really fast, and it is already 2nd week of May. I will be leaving for Taiwan again in a month. This time, I will be presenting in the Asia-Pacific Coral Reef Symposium 2014 conference, as well as working on the last field experiment. There are quite a few things to be done on this trip, that I doubt I will be able to finish everything before I need to come back to New Zealand in July. My original plan was to ensure that this June trip would be the final research trip to Taiwan, but I am predicting that I may need to visit Taiwan again in December.

Hannah got an offer for a new position in University of Auckland. Congratulations to her! She will be the online coordinator for  the first year Biochemistry course. Although the position is only part-time, adding on to her responsibilities as tutors, marking for test papers, she is expecting a busy half year ahead. I will let her post her experience of her new position herself sometime later once she got settled in.