It's 6:40 AM, and there's already a lot of activity going on in the park. Besides the two people doing taiji (the man in the black pants and white shirt started about an hour earlier by himself at 5:45), there's a much larger group in one of the other courtyards. The guy, who was there every day, looks so insignificant here. A note here: Our hotel windows were very dirty, and in order for me to take clear pictures of the park or the city in the distance, I had to open one (like this, that's as far as they would open) and stick my hand outside and snap the picture. Even with my phone strapped to my hand, I still worried about dropping it eight floors to the ground below.

Here's my breakfast this morning. That's not milk, but rather 豆漿 (soy milk) that was so good, both Mei-O an I drank a lot! That white square is 蘿蔔糕 (turnip cake) which was also so good we both ate a lot of them. Here are some of the selections we had to choose from.

Today was an important day. Meihui drove Mei-O and me to see their older brother 銘期 (Mingqi), who in January lost his wife to COPD and heart disease and his younger son 志承 (Zhicheng), who was distraught over his mother's death, to suicide. It was about a 45 minute ride to Mingqi's in Dadu, close to Taiwan's west coast. Our goal, of course, was to get the family together and try to ease some of Mingqi's pain. Hopefully, as we spent time with him today, we helped. Zhiwei was there and seemed glad to see us. We would be spending more time with Mingqi and Zhiwei during our visit.

After spending time with Mingqi and Zhiwei in their home, Zhiwei drove us all to 瓦城泰國料理 (Thai Town) in the Msquare Shopping Center for lunch today. The restaurant is near what he calls "his office", a Starbucks from where he works almost every day. And this was in the Msquare courtyard too.

Then Mingqi had the idea for us to go visit 東海大學 (Tunghai University) where I went to school from June of 1972 to June of 1973. Other than the iconic Luce Memorial Chapel designed by the renowned architect I. M. Pei, I couldn't recognize anything, any of my classrooms, the common areas, just any of the parts of the campus I spent time on.

Dairy production has become a big part of Tunghai's curriculum; they have an ice cream shop on campus featuring their products. Of course, we had to try some. Nearby was this small shack. I thought there might be inside a history or some pictures of the school's dairy industry, but it turned out it was just for trash and recycling!

So we went over to check out the university's cows where all their dairy products come from, and discovered they also have horses. A lot had changed since I was here 53 years ago!

From Tunghai, Zhiwei drove us back to the hotel (0:45, watch for the bug near the end of this video). We were tired. After Zhiwei dropped us off, as we walked back to the hotel, we stopped to just sit in the park for a while, and watched some kids swinging and climbing right in front of our bench. Eventually we went back to our room and relaxed until we went to bed.

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