Birds and Astronomy

July 15th- Today was the first full day in Xitou. I wanted to start this post with a quick side note from my usual lecture and tour focus. I would like to quickly touch on the breakfast buffets in Taiwan. They are FANTASTIC! At a typical US breakfast buffet you would be lucky to get fruit and sometimes even hot food. The buffet here covers almost half of the room and has everything! It goes from eggs and steam buns, to chicken nuggets and fries, to cake and watermelon. I really could rave forever. 

Let me focus back on the major happenings of the day. We got an introduction presentation about Xitou and then were given a bit of time to explore the area. Chris and I went to the shopping areas right outside Xitou's limits. There was a really cute Japanese style market where I will definitely be frequenting throughout our time here.

We had three more lectures today. The first two dealt with birds and techniques of bird data collection. Both of the lectures were pretty interesting. I especially enjoyed hearing about the data collection techniques. There seems to be easy to have errors in bird population collection. The lecturer explained that the error is overcome by looking more at trends than anything else. That makes sense to me. Our lecture of the night was from a really knowledgeable man who worked at a National Museum in Taiwan. His lecture dealt with astronomy. He seemed to know everything about everything. It was a great lecture and it was nice finishing it off at the observatory later that night. 

At the observatory we weren't able to see any stars due to the cloud coverage. The lecturer made up for that though and we had some great views from the cabins we stayed at.