Li polymer cells in parallel
It is possible to put Li-ion/LiPo cells in parallel, due to their self-balancing nature. Simply make sure that the cells are almost equally charged before connecting them, and then give them a day or so to let them balance.

They can also be charged in parallel, but since the current is distributed among all the cells it will naturally take longer to charge given a specific current; the current can be multiplied by the number of parallel sets to mitigate this.