travel: TW, 5 June

The whole trip was highly anticipated for many reasons:

- Landmark travel as a final destination to complete my Greater China exposure. The last of the Greater China under my belt at last!

- Highlight a completion of my first job and before joining the family affray.

- Home-stay experience plus a local friend as guide and a fellow traveling companion.

The food was great, the company was fantastic and it totally injected the love of travel back into me a bit. We did the tourist like things of photo-snappy, share bits of street food - buying and eating, then eating again!

I like the way Taiwanese describe things, they have an interesting vocabulary and there are 2 words I like in particular: 十分 and 非常. They both mean "very", "perfect" or "extreme". At one point in the past, I remember a 非常台湾. So it was very strange then to find a "十分车站" along the railway tracks in 瑞芳 - Ruifang (a small town outside of Taipei). The sepia photo to the right, is an exact of a postcard they were trying to sell at NT$100. Ha. As if we'll pay that!

Oh, the third picture is one of the many views I enjoy on the train with my head stuck out of the window. The wind howling by your ears, the scenary zipping from green to brown and then suddenly all black as you enter the tunnel. It was great great fun!

There are more tourist-y pictures I won't be posting - such as our visits to 九份 (Jiufeng) and the Taipei 101 and the over-dose of Hello Kitty etc. These are the run-of-mill ones that you'll see when you are next in Taipei. The homes-stay experience was amazing and the Taiwanese are generally very welcoming to guests. I thank you all that took care of us. And funnily, I do miss the that family.

Some regrets: that although the shopping was very interesting, it was way too expensive to be pleasurable; and that we did not plan our time better to include central/ southern Taiwan.
So, again, again!