Day 1

Whew! What a day! It's about 9 pm here, and I'm going to try to put in my first post before I crash onto my cousin's son's bed which is as soft as a gymnastics floor mat. My cousin and his wife picked us up at Taipei airport and took us immediately to a breakfast place where we ate fried dumplings, sou bin yu tiau and dojung ( fried dough in crispy flatbread with savory warm soy milk) mixed in with the diesel fumes of passing scooters and motorcycles.


From the moment we landed, it's been a series of other-world experiences. My cousin and his wife live in a posh new apartment development with glossy marble slab flooring and an expansive lobby with a baby grand piano and 3 desk clerks. But they are the salt of the earth and lovely people. Right after a quick pitstop at their home, we met with my other cousins. While my dad went off to visit with his brother-in-law and later, his father, I went with my cousins to see the Taipei Floral Expo. It is really a small metropolis of botanical displays and enviro-technology. The first couple of hours, I walked around oohing and aahing along with 24,000 other visitors, but after 4 hours, I started to fade and couldn't care anymore about pretty blossoms. We also watched The Wrath of Nature - Taipei's Inconvenient Truth, a 3D animation story about the flash flooding and rock slide problem that Taiwan occasionally suffers during heavy rainfalls. The little film pulled no punches as we watched a brutal mudslide take out a whole village, including several screaming grandparents and a girl and her boyfriend on their motorcycle.

For lunch, although I was still stuffed from the big greasy breakfast, I bought a meal from one of the food stalls in the Expo and tried "stinky tofu", which i didn't really like at all. My dad later told me that it needs to be eaten with a lot of chili sauce, but I don't think I'll try it again. On our way home, we picked up a couple of steamed buns (bao ze) for about 45 cents each and that was my supper. Food is so cheap and yummy here that people literally eat out all the time, for breakfast, lunch and supper.