Yesterday we went to the 921 Earthquake Museum of Taiwan.  It is located at the ruins of Kuang-Fu Junior High School, which was destroyed during the Chi-Chi earthquake of 2004.  They built the museum around the wrecked school grounds to preserve the damaged site.  The museum also features educational exhibits about earthquakes, a 3-D movie theater, and a moving theater "earthquake experience."  Unfortunately we didn't get to go in the moving theater because there were too many people ahead of us and our group was too large to get finished before our time ran out.  We did watch the 3-D movie.  It was an animated cartoon called Tree Robo that was essentially a children's environmentalist propaganda movie.  The animation was really cute and the score was great (the Taiwanese really know how to score epic educational videos). Long story short, little boy and solar powered robot live happily in a gorgeous mountain valley.  New, advanced nuclear-powered robots come and destroy the land to take it's resources and take the solar powered robot to do forced labor.  In the smog the solar powered robot can't work, he goes to sleep, and wars destroy the nuclear powered robot world.  Many years later the sun penetrates the clouds and a tree seed that was protected in the robots body sprouts, "revitalizes" him and grows on his back.  Robot goes back to look for the boy, who is now an old man that spent his life trying to replant the valley. The robot is decrepit and about to die, but borne of it's desire to make the land whole again, he and the tree on his back magically restore it to its original splendor (the robot disappears but the tree is still there).  The old man spends his last days in happiness.  Why you needed to know the whole story, I have no idea.

In the afternoon we went to the Biotechnology Center of the Taiwan Agriculture Research Institute for a presentation and brief tour.  The center is only five years old, and the government spent US $10 million to build it.  The focus of the center is maintaining, propagating, and evaluating genetic recombination events (GM crops) for commercial potential and environmental risk.  They have airtight and semi-airtight greenhouses, net houses, and field plots in addition to their lab space.  A few of the projects they are working on include fusarium resistant banana, chrysanthemums and orchids with new coloration, and ring spot and mosaic virus resistant papaya.