some wintertime happenings

Now that the weather isn't so oppressively hot, there have been lots of nice-looking vegetables. These oyster mushrooms are SO CHEAP - I can get a small bag for 25 cents! There are also yard-long beans in the photo and I've been eating lots of great looking broccoli, cabbage and asian greens! yum!
This next photo is a closeup of some awesome allium-family vegetables that I've been using in a lot of cooking recently. I had to put my hand in it for scale - otherwise they look like chives--they're like giant green onions with no white ends.
And here's an example of the limes that are in season now - small, no pulp and no juice. :-(
This photo was taken because we bought a big bag and juiced them all and only got the little bit of juice in the glass there. I'm holding a particularly pathetic example.....
And here are my friends laughing about the limes as we socialize and mix drinks in my kitchen (for the record, Professor Andrea is only making hot chocolate)
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I took a walk recently to the forest research institute again with a friend - this time we walked down the "bambuseum" trail. Here we are in front of some fairly large varieties:There were some GIGANTIC bamboo on the walk (the trunks were like 2-3 feet wide in diameter), but they were mixed in with people's huts and yards and of course everyone was staring at us, so I didn't want to take out the camera to take photos of the bamboo.
There's also a very excellent plant nursery on the way to the forest and we stopped and bought some plants and soil. here I am enjoying the greenery:
Then we tried to buy some soil--they had a nice looking pile as seen on the right of the next photo. Of course, it took like 20 minutes to get the shovel and scale and communicate how much we wanted. During that time, a crowd started to gather to watch the exciting action of two white foreigners buying dirt! Here's the early formation of the crowd: by the time we were finished, they were three deep behind the fence!
We got some good dirt and plants in the end and now i have some seeds I'm anxiously awaiting to be sprouted!
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And a final photo of the crazy fog out my window one morning. As you can see, it's a complete white-out. I just set my camera on my patio looking down towards the ground and could see absolutely nothing: