Eat Healthy. Think Healthy.

Why would I ever wake up at 5:30 am?

Few reasons, seeing that I am a night owl. Past reasons include: an early flight and preparing for a marathon or triathlon. This morning was to bird watch. On an average of five hours of sleep, we headed out into the forest. Turns out that summer is the worst time to bird watch in Taiwan. I believe it, because within two hours I only saw three birds and all of them were White-nosed Sibia. Most of the birds are currently nesting, which means that they're very careful not to show themselves or risk a predator following them to their nest.

Our guide was very funny. when telling us how to use binoculars, he told us not to look at the sun and that if we did, we'd smell something burning. Our eyeballs. Ouch.




I saw other things through my binoculars, such as Kevin's large face, mountains, farming houses, leaves, and some Watermelon butterflies. Often the view from my naked eye was better, especially when trying to find birds. But of course everything looked better up close. Except for maybe my classmate's faces.

Can JiLing see a bird?

 I feel like I'm back in Chicagoland. Not because of the views, because nothing in Naperville looks like this:

But because of the weather. Chilly in the morning and night. A little sunny in the afternoon.

The plus side of waking up early is that you feel extremely productive by lunch time.We did two hours of bird watching even before breakfast, then took a tour of MeiFeng Farm. While walking through the green houses, we got to use more than our eyes. I especially liked smelling the mint leaves and eucalyptus plant. My favorite one to eat was a flower related to the rose. It tasted sour and delicious. The most popular one was called Stevia. It tasted syrupy sweet and can be used as a natural sweetener.

We also walked through Lavender fields, a dried flower room, hedge maze, a succulent green house (YAY plants from USA), cabbage and lettuce greenhouses, and mystery greenhouses. They were locked from the outside. Vico and I speculated that they're growing illegal drugs there and that's why the Experimental farm has such high revenue.

We pretended to be farmers again today. In one of the cabbage greenhouses, we had to pull weeds from an entire row. I will not be choosing this as my next career. After twenty minutes of squatting, my knees couldn't take it any more. So I assumed the jimmy position. My classmate Jimmy was bending at the hip to pick them up. This method felt a lot better. Both he and Benji came here from Singapore, where they both served in the army/National Service. While picking, we passed time grilling them with questions about the military. The training and learning process doesn't seem that much different from what I know of America's military. The only difference that I learned about is that for the next ten or so years, they have to be retested to make sure they're still fit. Seems like the system is "not bad, quite good" as they would say.

 At lunch we met our professor. I was very impressed that he is fluent in English, Mandarin and probably French, seeing as he's from Quebec, Canada. His lecture covered table waste composting and organic vegetables. In Taiwan, there's a high density population, which also leads to high pollution. 1.6 kg of table scraps per household per day seems like an awful lot! Taiwan's recycling system is very comprehensive. They separate plastic, metal, paper and food scraps. The only problem is that there's no where to put these scraps. Our professor, Pierre, takes up to three tons of food scraps per day to his beach house to compost it. Wow! It can get up to 80 degrees C or 176 degree F! He then takes this compost to grow veggies.

His motto: Eat healthy. Think healthy. Have fun. Remember to go back to life, in the ground.

Later at night we went on a hike for insect watching. I am usually alright with them, but tonight I got the heeby jeebies looking at them, especially the pupae. Even so, I had a good time watching moths, stick bugs, beetles and more.