Another lazy morning- got Max and Mae off to school.  No pajama incident this morning- will have to wait until later in the day to embarrass the 13 year old.  Insert evil laugh………. all day have been hearing firecrackers going off.  When Zach and I went to lunch saw one of the sources in front of our SUGO Dept. Store- there were like a million spent firecrackers on the ground and some kind of parade with musicians, puppets and some religious looking piece.

Zach and I found a place to eat in the food court at SUGO- he was hungry for noodle soup and i’m always up for dumplings:

 Don’t know if you can see, but I have a HUGE mess around my plates.  Like a visually impaired 4 year old sat there using chop sticks for the 1st time.  Nice!

Stopped to get some fruit at the grocery store- it’s so yummy over here.  Lychee’s are in season so I get to eat them daily:  case full of tofu selections!

Kids were home from school by the time we got back- M & M just want to vedge when they get back from school.  Mae made a fan today and learned Mandarin weather words.  She really seems to like it and is constantly giving me jabs about the fact that she cannot speak Chinese.  It’s so cute!  She is truly an urban kid, when she got home from school and heard the fireworks her question was “is that gun fire?”.

Decided to go “left” toward the big Japanese department stores as I had to stop at TLI.   Took the back alley way because we had to stop at the kid’s school:

so that they could make a copy of Mae’s passport photo page.  She is going on a field trip to the National Museum tomorrow and they need it for insurance.

On the way heard the fireworks about 3 blocks from our house and stumbled upon this:  Music making grandma’s- super obnoxious horn things played at deafening sound level/spent firecrackers that still had some live ones in there so they would periodically explode scaring the crap out of me:

The weird puppet men:

 And what ever they were carrying!

Never a dull moment!  Snapshots of Old China in urban Taipei.