We finally made it back to Taipei and after spending two weeks in six different hotels, I am exhausted! But it was totally worth it because I got to see how amazing Taiwan is.

Today we went to the 921 Earthquake Museum of Taiwan. The Museum opened on September 21, 2004, the 5^th anniversary of the Chi-Chi earthquake. We were able to see the destruction caused by the 7.3 magnitude earthquake at the museum. Oh and an interesting fact I learned here is that Taiwan has over 15,000 earthquakes a year, that is insane!

After the museum we headed to the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute. We had a brief introduction on their Biotechnology Division and later we were able to see the airtight greenhouses and rice paddies where they grow their transgenic crops. This lab was established in 2007 and includes 10 hectares of land. Some of their projects include increasing the shelf life of broccoli and bananas, creating different colored chrysanthemums, perfecting crop resistance, and mass cultivating Chinese medicinal plants like Salvia. I learned something very interesting in this lecture. Bananas do not produce pollen or seeds so you can not use traditional breeding techniques on them. That means that you have to borrow genes from other plants and insert them into the banana’s genome so that it will be resistant to plant pathogens like Fusarium spp., which causes Fusarium wilt.

Tomorrow we actually get to go out into the rice paddies and plant our own rice. Should be exciting!