10/10 Fun!

We had a long weekend last week, and on Friday I went out with some friends from Yilan for the day. First stop was a mushroom plantation. Now, when they told me we were going to pick mushrooms, it sounded really cool until I started thinking about it.... wait a minute... don't mushrooms grow in.....?
Well these ones didn't! They grew in bags which were placed along shelves in a refrigerated room. We went inside and were given baskets to pick as many as we wanted. Later we had a barbecue and grilled them. They were DELICIOUS! I still have some left from my huge bag, which only cost me about $4.00 Canadian (120NT), and I'm planning to make soup, and a marinara spaghetti sauce with them this week.

Before we took our mushrooms back to BBQ, we went to a lake in the area that I'd never been to before. It was really nice there, and we had a great stroll around the lake. This area, being more remote and closer to the coast, really got hit bad by the two super typhoons. While most of the cleanup in Yilan city is finished (street lights are back on, signs are back up, trees were pushed back into the ground), the cleanup here was still in the beginning stages, and we could see that there was a LOT of damage, including many ruined trees, a suspension bridge that was blocked off because it was bent out of shape, and a debris-covered path near the water that wasn't walkable anymore.
I'm having problems uploading more pictures at the moment, but I'll link to a facebook album soon.