Uncategorized – To Travel Much

How to Go to Taichung Zhongshe Flower Farm by Bus or Train

Do you love flowers? Do you love being out in the countryside and taking instagram-worthy pictures with interesting backgrounds? Are you up for an adventure on the Taichung public transportation system? Then read on.

The Zongshe Flower Farm (also sometimes called the Chung She Flower Farm or Houli Flower Farm) makes for a nice day tour outside of Taichung. It’s located about about 30km north of Taichung City. The flowers bloom year-round and the farm grows different species of flowers depending on the season. Tulips in the winter, sunflowers in the summer. The lavenders bloom all year round!

To go from Taichung City to Zongshe Flower Farm by bus, take bus 55 to Fengyuan Station. Ride the bus all the way to the end of the route, Fengyuan Station. In the same bus terminal, transfer to bus 6606. Bus 6606 is bound for Taipei city.

The bus ride on bus 55 from Taichung City takes about 45 minutes, while the ride from Fengyuan Station to Zongshe takes about 25 minutes. The bus 6606 stop is right across the road to Zongshe. Just cross the road and you are there! You can take bus 55 from Taichung Station Minzu Road, Gancheng Station, Taichung Park, Fengjia Night Market/National Taichung University or opposite Chungyo department store. There are frequent bus 55 trips, however the bus 6606 only travels once every hour. Zongshe is the 6th stop from Fengyuan. When you board the bus, you would have to pay the bus fare in cash, and remind the bus driver to inform you when the bus is at Zongshe.

To go back to Fengyuan, take the bus 6606 which stops right outside Zongshe Flower Farm.

The best time to go is in the afternoon, an hour or two right before the farm closes at 6pm. If you are taking the bus back to Fengyuan, do note that the 6606 passes by at around 5:30pm and 6:30pm so you will either have to leave the farm earlier, or wait for the bus for some time.

Alternatively, you could take the TRA, the regional train. You would be riding on the Taichung line or the Mountain line. To go to Zhongshe Flower Farm by train, take the TRA from Taichung Main Station to Tai’an Station (8 stations away). From Tai’an station, you would need to take a taxi to Zhongshe Flower Farm as it is too far to walk! The taxi fare is fixed, usually the drivers ask for NTD120-150 fares each way.

Lots of Flowers and Lots of Props Makes for Lots of Photo Spots

Have a great time at Xongshe taking lots of photos. We visited in the summer and they had manicured flower beds of great big sunflowers, colorful daisies, dainty lavenders and sweet rose bushes. They also have lots of props, like a white piano in a sea of lavender blooms, romantic white swings, arching bridges and Holland-inspired windmills. There is also a pond full of lotus flowers.

The surrounding fields are planted with rice and vegetables, and in the distance are the mountains. You can really enjoy the wide open space here.

Location: No. 333 Section 5, Sanfeng Road, Houli District, Taichung City, Taiwan 421

Entrance Fee: NTD120; NTD150 during tulip season. If you are eating lunch at the farm’s outdoor barbecue restaurant, they have promotional prices for the two activities combined.

The farm is open from 9am to 6pm only.

To help you navigate the Taichung bus system, read here about How to Use the Taichung Bus System

Read the rest of our Taichung Bus Series:

How to Go to Gaomei Wetlands by Bus

How to Go to Rainbow Village by Bus

How much does IVF in Taiwan Cost?

For our second IVF attempt, we went to Lee Women’s Hospital in Taichung, Taiwan.

This hospital is fast becoming a popular option for Filipino couples looking for IVF treatment because of Lee Women’s Hospital’s high success rate, Taiwan is only a 3-hour flight from Manila, visa-free for 14 days, and the costs is comparable to IVF procedures in Philippines.

How much does IVF in Lee Womens Hospital cost?

We paid in total NTD117,650 (equivalent to PhP229,500 or USD3,800) for one cycle. Here is the breakdown of our expenses:

First Visit to Taiwan/Initial consultation (duration 3 days stay): NTD10,000 (doctor consultation, ultrasound, blood tests) plus NTD30,000 (medicines for stimulating follicles good for 8 days).

We informed the clinic on day 1 of my next menstrual cycle and was told to visit the clinic on day 8.

On our second visit to Taiwan (duration 30 days stay) our medical expenses were:

Day 8: NTD4,500 (ultrasound, blood tests and more medicines) plus NTD800 for semen analysis
Day 10: NTD6,000 (ultrasound, blood tests and more medicines)
Day 11: NTD5,000 (ultrasound, blood tests, urine test, and more medicines)
Egg Retrieval: ND30,000
Embryo Transfer: NTD60,000 (including fertilization by ICSI and laser assisted hatching)
Pregnancy Test: NTD1,350

Our Total Expenses: NTD117,650.

Please note that the above figures are based on our own experience only, for one cycle and using fresh transfer embryos.

The actual costs of treatment will depend on what tests your doctor will order and what kind of medicines you need. It may happen that follicles may not grow as rapidly as hoped, in which case your doctor may change or adjust the dosage of your medicines. Lee Hospital’s approach is to produce as many follicles and embryos as possible. Therefore, for older women able to produce only a few follicles each cycle, you may have to do a back to back retrieval, in which case your cost of medicines and egg retrieval will be multiplied as well (say total may go up NTD200,000 or USD6,500).

The clinic does not accept credit cards or debit cards so payment is a bit of a hassle. Payment is cash in NTD or USD, or USD telegraphic transfer only.

How about the accommodation costs? We stayed at Alice Hotel where they charged NTD30,000 for a 30-day stay. Taxis cost NTD85 flag down and to go most places will cost you only NTD160 (USD6) or less. Buses around Taichung are free for the first 10km provided you have an easycard. Food in mall foodcourts cost NTD150 per meal on average. Alice Hotel has stoves and a microwave so cooking your own meals is an option.

Including flights, accommodation costs and expenses, the grand total could rack up to P500,000 (USD9,500). Not cheap at all!

Visas (for Filipinos)

Taiwan allows Filipinos to visit visa-free for 14 days. If you need to stay longer, apply for a visa in Manila by going to the Taiwanese consulate. Visa when processed in Manila cost Php2,600.

Otherwise, to extend your stay in Taichung, you need to go to their Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The fee to extend the visa once you’re already in Taiwan cost NTD3,200, which is more expensive than when processed in your home country.

The visa requirements include documents to support why you need to visit Taiwan, birth and marriage certificates from PSA (NSO) and income and financial evidences such as bank statements.

Baby Dust to Every Hopeful Parents Out There!

IVF is expensive, invasive to your body and emotionally draining. Before going, arm yourself with as much knowledge as possible and prepare your wallet, and your heart for a roller-coaster ride of hope, disappointment, despair, frustration, and hopefully a happy pregnancy and a healthy baby at the end of it.

Please read here for the full story of our IVF Journey at Lee Women’s Hospital, here on how we survived Taichung, and here if you want to know what happens during the IVF process.

IVF at Lee Womens Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan

What happens during IVF?

The IVF Process

It’s not easy to undergo IVF treatments. IVF is expensive, complicated and invasive. Most of the procedures involves the woman’s body and these procedures can be painful: she would need to inject herself with hormones. They are invasive: think numerous transvaginal ultrasounds and guess how they collect the follicles and transfer the embryos? yep with a catheter through the vagina, baby. Its time consuming: you need to make numerous trips to the clinic. In addition IVF is expensive and the chances of success are pretty slim. When you go for IVF be prepared to go on an emotional rollercoaster ride of hope and disappoint. It may take many cycles before you conceive. It’s also possible that even with IVF you will not be successful.

In case you don’t know yet, baby making, biologically speaking, may be divided into 3 phases: ovulation where the woman produces an egg from her ovaries, fertilisation where said egg is joined with a sperm and develops into an embryo, and implantation where the embryo gets implanted in the uterus and grows. The IVF process closely follows the natural cycle: basically produce an egg(s), take the egg(s) out of the woman, fertilise the egg (s) with sperm in a laboratory then put the embryo(s) back in the woman and hope for the best.

There are 5 basic steps to the IVF process.
1) First step is to stimulate the development and release of follicles from the woman’s ovaries. In this stage, the woman takes oral meds and injections to stimulate her ovaries to produce as many eggs as they can. If you decide to do IVF you will get familiar with medicines like GonalF, Puregon or Menopur which are follicle stimulating hormones. As the name suggests these medicines stimulates the development and release of follicles. Inside a follicle is an egg. Depending on the dosage and her responsiveness to these medicines, a woman could produce up to 10 or more eggs in one cycle. Younger women (under 30) are able to produce as many as 25 eggs while those in their 40s may struggle to produce even a single egg per cycle. The follicle stimulating hormones are usually taken daily from day 2 to day 12 of the woman’s cycle. Depending on the clinic’s protocol the woman may need to inject herself up to twice a day. She may need to visit the clinic on days 2, day 5, day 8, then daily afterwards for ultrasounds and blood tests. The development of the follicles is monitored by transvaginal ultrasounds to measure the size of the growing egg and blood tests (yes more pricking) for hormone levels.
2) The second step is to retrieve or harvest the eggs. Once the follicles are at least 18mm in size (as measured in an ultrasound), the woman gets her trigger shot. Within 36 hours of the trigger shot, the eggs are retrieved. The egg retrieval is usually done in an operating room. If there are numerous eggs the procedure may be done under general anaesthesia. Your legs are going to be strapped in stirrups and the doctor is going to puncture your ovaries with a needle and suck out the follicles. There is going to be some blood and maybe a little discomfort during and after retrieval.
3) Third step is fertilisation. The husband (or whoever male is your sperm provider) would have to masturbate in a clinical environment and ehem, collect the specimen for the IVF clinic’s handling. The sperm is put through a centerfuge and only those healthy ones are used. There are two ways to fertilise the eggs in the laboratory. The first one is by putting collected egg and sperms together in a Petri dish and one of the sperms get to be the lucky one to fertilise the egg. The second method is ICSI short for Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection in which a single sperm (don’t ask me how this single sperm gets choosen) but this one lucky sperm is injected directly inside the egg thereby fertilising it, that is there is no need for the sperms to swim for the egg, a lucky one is shoved in the door. The embryo (egg and sperm together) is then grown in the laboratory for 2-5 days. The embryo may then be transferred to the uterus (fresh embryo transfer) or frozen for future use.
4) The fourth step is transferring the embryo into the woman’s uterus (womb). After fertilisation, the embryo grows form a single cell to become two, then four, then eight cells and so on. Within 2-5 days of retrieval, the embryo is transferred to the womb. Similar to the egg retrieval, transfer may be done in an operating room with the help of ultrasound. Blood tests will be done to check that hormone levels are good and ultrasounds will check that the uterus lining is ready before the transfer is confirmed. Injections of progesterone may also be given before and after transfer to support the uterus lining.
5) The fifth step is the dreaded wait between transfer and pregnancy test. Hormones supplements especially progesterone are taken to support the pregnancy. Within two weeks of transfer, blood tests can confirm whether there is a pregnancy or not.

Chances of pregnancy generally goes down with the woman’s age. Not every IVF procedure results in a pregnancy, and not every IVF pregnancy results in a live birth. Before deciding to do IVF, be sure to arm yourself with as much information as you can. It’s physically, emotionally and financially draining. There are many success stories and they are inspiring but it’s also important to be realistic with what IVF can do for you.

Read here for our first IVF attempt at Kato and our second IVF at Lee Women Hospital.