Flying Cow Ranch

We had a fun-filled day with friends at the Flying Cow Ranch: http://www.flyingcow.com.tw/  It's only about an hour drive north-west of a Taichung...in good traffic. I'm composing this post as we sit on the freeway on our drive home :(

We had eight kids with us ages 9, 9, 8, 6, 6, 6, 2, and nearly 2 and they all highly recommend the place! Our six hour visit included feeding all sorts of animals and multiple visits to their interesting playground.

We finished up with hot chocolate at the cafe. I underestimated the chilly, damp factor if Taiwan's 60 degrees and we were quite cold without hats and mittens and warmer jackets! Lesson learned.

The Official Feast

We did get our Thanksgiving feast a couple of days later.
Some friends invited us to their home along with another Taiwanese family who had never had a Thanksgivign meal before. We did our best to make it as authentic as possible:

Luckily our friends found a seasonal service that offers fullly roasted turkeys (it's a rare thing to have an oven over here--we lucked out with our baby oven in our apartment). As with most poultry over here, this turkey kept his head through the whole ordeal. We didn't invite the head to the table, however. 

The foreign import store provided some familiar fixings for our olive/pickle tray.

And we weren't without deviled eggs, candied yams and greenbean casserol :) 

Our only disappointment was to find out the CostCo failed to supply their normal stock of pumpkin pie around Thanksgiving time this year. But complaining wouldn't be Thanksgiving-y, so I won't :) 

Black Friday

Although our Thanksgiving day wasn't very traditional, Ben and I stuck by the Black Friday shopping tradition and hit the markets. We went to a street that was lined with clothing shop after clothing shop [BeiPing Rd] and picked out a few "English" t-shirt gems for Christmas gifts. 

Here is an example of what English verbiage you can find on some shirts here in Taiwan. Hilarious!

We also finally got to one of the jade markets. There were so many beautiful carved pieces of jade and other works of art. We didn't buy much--things were more expensive than we had hoped--but I now have a wish-list started :)