Christmas

Christmas in Taiwan

Christmas is all over Taiwan, but I think it's mostly an excuse for stores to change their store docorations. This includes Christmas music, it's quaint hearing the traditional music, I remember them from the nonstop Christmas music my mother played around Christmas time.

For Christmas, I made spaghetti, red sauce, green basil and parsley and white noodles. Red, green and white, the Christmas colors.

Although there are not real Christmas trees in Taiwan, but plenty of artificial trees. Here are some from arround Taiwan.

From the Taipei Main Train Station lobby.

From the restaurant in the Regent Hotel

 From a store in TaiZhong made with pieces of wood cut to look like books that matched the library motif.

A Tree from the Flower Expo in Taipei.

And from the lobby of our building.

My Eyes

My eyes are getting better, I had laser treatment on both eyes. With the laser treatment, the small tears in the retina are melted by the  laser and then the melted edges fuse together. The retina will gradually regenerate, a few months out. I still have a bubble of gas in my right eye but it is getting smaller and doesn't effect the laser treatments. Because of the optics of the eye, I percieve the bubble as being at the bottom of my eyeball but I know from its bouyance that it floating around at the top of my eyeball.

Onr of the disconcerting effects is to focus on the tiles in the bathroom. The horizontal and vertical lines are jagged in spots where the retina had been melted together. But with my magnifying headset I can now read the newspaper.

I'm scheduled for more laser treatments on this Thursday. It's a lot like being at the dentist's with cavities but there is no novocaine and they're working on your eyes. You want to sit still because he's using a laser on your eyes, but it still hurts.