first day

wooooooow, everything is so cool! yeaah, for sure going to be blogging frequently.

so, it is only 9:30pm and i am really exhausted... but it's k. still need to work on my power point presentation of my project due tmr morning at 10. today was a really fun day though.

us 4 showed up to the lab at 10am. we were shown the facilities by one of dr. fan's assistants since he wasn't there. but maaaan, the whole place was really awesome. i'll let these pictures speak for themselves.

[first look at the husbandry]

[one type of soft coral in one of the tanks]

[sea turtle!]

showed to this rosie, who then squealed (via AIM chat) in delight, haha. apparently, there is a place in the lab where they put injured sea turtles in for them to recover.

[one of the bigger coral tanks]

[sea cucumber!]

after these awesome tours, another one of tony's lab assistants then took the 4 of us out on a little town trip to get some groceries and such.

[a glimpse of town]

went and bought some noodles, vegetables, fruits, drinks, and who can forget, beer.

[types of taiwan beer]

lol, it's nice to be able to buy beer legally AND to not have people question your age or even try to figure it out when you're checking out.

Naizhen, the assistant, was really awesome for carting us everywhere in town, haha. he even bought all of us boba and such. =D

when we got back to the lab, we were finally able to talk to tony. we discussed our projects and possible equipment we might need and our objectives for the experiments. left for home afterward with michael and robert, but as we reached our aparment building, we got sidetracked by this little guy:

found this crab walking in the quad-ish area of our apartment, and as soon as it caught sight of me, michael, and robert, it hightailed out of the area... into the public restroom, which was just a room with a toilet and sink. decided to catch it and release it back into the wild.. haha.

ohhhh boy. anyway, as can be seen, i ended up at the beach for the first time. wasn't really a beach? it was very rocky, with remains of fragmented corals on the sandier/rockier area and the actual dead reef spread along the shoreline.

[calcium remains of euphyllia galabra(?)]

[town of kenting from rocky, dead coral reef shore]

anyway, got really tired, hot, and sticky, so finally went back to the apartment, took a nice long cold shower. fixed myself some noodles to eat, settled down, and started working on this blogpost, haha. now i have to work on the presentation and then heading early off to bed. more to come later... but hopefully not as long? if you survived reading this uber long post, i commend you, haha. can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store.