Xitou photos

Since I didn't get around to putting up many pictures of Xitou Experimental Forest while we were there, I will go ahead and put a few up now.

Frog eggs inside a bamboo fence post

 Epiphytic ferns! Don't ask me why, but I love them.

Big boulder that broke off a cliff durning an earthquake and rolled down here

Bamboo arboretum

Cryptomeria japonica (a type of cypress) is the predominant species of tree in Xitou.  They were all planted by the Japanese around 1960.

The famous bamboo bridge over the University Pond.  There's some folk tale about crossing this bridge so that you will get accepted to NTU.

Skywalk

My project group and all of the plant species samples we collected

Yesterday felt strange because we did a lot of waiting.  In the morning my group went to the classroom so that we could use the internet for a while after breakfast (there wasn't any in the cottage).  We also got started on our project paper, but we were still waiting for the pH meter to come so that we could test our soil samples.  During lunch they told us that the man with the pH meter would come at 1pm, so we waited for him.  When 1pm came someone told us that it would be 2pm, so we waited some more.  He finally did show up and we got to take our pH readings.  But as with all pH meters, this one was slow and finicky and we had to wait a long time for each sample to finally stabilize on a particular pH.  By the time we were finished it was nearly time for dinner.  It was pretty frustrating, but we got it done.