Beef tomato noodles at www.olddon.com.tw are good.

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So I finally posted a video tour of our apartment.  Warning: 25MB.  There are more pics up in the Taiwan gallery too.

In other news, we’re getting fully settled in.  Work is going well but keeping me extremely busy. I like walking to the office tower every day, even when it’s raining, it makes me feel like a grown-up for a some reason; apparently my brain didn’t think I was a grown up before.  I’m really learning to appreciate the location of the apartment, everything we need seems just a short walk or ride away.  I got my first Taiwanese haircut and it looks good – at a high end place down the street, only about $13 with a hair wash.  Like Costa Rica, I’m starting to get annoyed if I spend more than $3-4 on lunch.  My lunchtime  tighfistedness  had eroded in Folsom, I had worn down to paying $8 without a second thought.

We’ve started Mandarin lessons – 4 hours a week.   I’m building a mental map of the city in my brain.   Food is still great – I’ve found a lot of good local places near work, and were sticking pretty faithfully to a different style  every time we go out (which is about half the time).  You can’t count Chinese food as one genre for this to work, however.  My running joke that Cynthia finds unamusing is constantly saying “Hey, why don’t we  go out for Chinese food?” .  Last night was mala hot pot with visiting US work friends – made with a Szechuan spicy broth.  Szechuan is shaping up to be my favorite Chinese food variety overall – it has the best sauces and it’s almost always spicy.   Taiwan style beef noodle soup is a very close second.   We’ve been sneaking American food at Yuma (Tex-Mex) and today friends took us to The Diner.   We will return to all of these places, and also break down and have pizza.

I’m not feeling homesick yet, probably because time is flying – its already almost November.  Cynthia and I are spending a week in Shanghai in early November and we’ll be back in the US for Xmas and New Years.   Let me know in the comments what you guys want to hear about.  For now, I’m going to thaw some frozen sauce and have pasta and garlic bread for dinner.

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I’ve posted up some crazy pics I took over the weekend . . .

This is a man-eating tree snail crawling on a sidewalk planter, almost as big as Cynthia’s hand

They were doing  underground work  in front of the apartment this week, and repaved it over the weekend.  Instead of moving parked cars with a tow truck, they used a forklift.  It was surprisingly efficient, though I don’t think either car nor forklift are intended for this application.

There are more pics from the week in the  Taiwan gallery.  I’ll continue to post there as new experiences occur.

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You want to make bean dip in Taiwan?  Need some canned chill?  Well, the pride of Eden Prarie has made it’s way to the Wellcome (we’re thinking of you Paul and Rachel).

Oh, also I changed the blog theme.  I may bring the old one back, but I can’t figure out how to manipulate the style sheet to make it look better on wide screens.

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I can post from my new blackberry storm now. Adding a pic

This is a shot of my office.  Cynthia is asleep and I don’t have anything else to shoot.  A beta test for more interesting things to come . . .  I can post life in real time now.

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