Happy New Year of the Horse, 2014!

Happy New Year of the Horse, 2014!

 

A little holiday lunch out at one of our favorite restaurants (it has free cotton candy, so that is a main draw for someone...)

 

 

 Our first excursion was to a pretty nice amusement park with Jo's cousin and family.  These pictures does not do the scene here justice since there was basically tons of things kids could go on: balloon slides, water boats, mini-bungee jumping, arcade games and of course tons of food.  I was too busy watching the kiddies to take good pics...but you get the idea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 At first I thought Sage would be too tired to control the boat, but he was a natural at it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then onto the other rides....

 

 

 

 

After a nice meal, we headed home to rest (since the traffic was terrible, as usual) but overall a good start to the New Year!

 

As per custom, everyone - I mean EVERYONE - gets into their cars on the second day of the New Year to go back to their wife's family's home and it is usually the worst traffic day of the entire year.  Usually we are spared the brunt since we head North while most people (who live in Taipei) go South, but this year for some reason, the stretch from our house to the on ramp to the highway, which usually takes less than 10 min, took 90 min.  And that did not bode well for the rest of the trip, either.  

 

However, Daddy and Sage at least were happy and I even encouraged Sage to start to copy some of the Chinese characters he saw in his books.  He is showing me one, now.  

Anyway, after a much longer time than usual, we arrived in TPE and had a quite nice time with many more people there than usual, too, which made things nicer (yet louder)...

 

After plenty of eating and playing carious gambling games, we all (15 of us) headed out to one of the relative's homes on the Northern tip of Taiwan called Nose Point (if you look carefully at a map of Taiwan, you will see why).

It was near the beach (always good for me to recharge) and quite nice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 New Years without a temple visit is impossible...

 

 

 

 

Nice sky

Here a bunch of the cousins are all hanging out at the rocky beach, which is perfect for Sage since he loves to throw rocks and collect shells and detrius....

We are back at the relative's house and Ya Wen is showing Sage how to do hopscotch

And A happy New Year without fire crackers is unthinkable as well!

Happy New Year!