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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Pat and I knocked down a few more cuisines the last 2 days. We had delicious indian food at a little place called Tandoor. We must have been there early because we were the first people in the restaurant, and it was friday night. We ordered a selection of awesomeness including lamb dahl (lentils) and a spicy chicken tikka masala. We skipped rice and plowed through some killer butter naan. yumyumyum. I want to eat more right now.We checked out of our hotel and moved into our apartment for good on Saturday morning. Noticed that our master bath smelled of sewer gas, and pat had not even been in there yet…had to do some “who speaks english and is in town that we can call to talk to the landlords” juggling and were informed that a plumber will be around on monday, and that the other floors were experiencing similar complaints. Another couple has moved into our nearly empty apartment building, on the 4th floor.It has been grey, annoyingly drizzly (but not really raining) and windy for the last 3 days, the rain finally picked up last night with some seriousness, and I had to send Pat off to his first day of work with my nice umbrella because the 100NT ($3) one we bought on the street is so cheap and crappy (who knew?). I hope he isn’t soaking when he gets there!Last night we braved the spitting clouds to head out for dinner at a sushi joint that we read about on “The Hungry Girl’s Guide to Taipei” (a really useful site written by a taiwan native who splits her time between here and cali, she puts maps and cost info and gives you helpful tips, like whether they have english menus etc.). The tea that they served us was amazing. It wasn’t sweetened, but it was light and fruity and smelled almost like plums. We ordered a tomato salad, a small sashimi platter, a tuna and avocado roll, and grilled asparagus. Everything was delicious. The sashimi platter had about 8 pieces on it, and the fish was so fresh and creamy. We paid our bill and left feeling like we stole something. $23 bucks for sushi dinner! Then we went to have a celebratory beverage at My Other Place to cap off the weekend. As we easily navigated back home through the winding alleys, we realized that the we were already scuffing off the *new* polish and breaking in Taipei.

indian · sushi · Taipei

 We’ve moved to Taiwan.

This implies some changes.  I will enumerate some of them:

1)  Cynthia is going to officially blog here now. She’s a better writer than me anyway, and given the time I expect to pour into my newly Taiwan-based job, my impressive (cough) blogging frequency was bound to suffer.  She can help fill in the gaps, because . . .

2) Interesting stuff is going to happen.  Not that interesting stuff wasn’t happening before . . . but there’s a new level of novelty when you move to a new continent.  I think the travel journal concept previously employed on this blog for sabbatical and other trips has been a success, and I’d like to carry that over on this more extended trip.

3) For the next couple years, we won’t be seeing the people we always used to see.  This was the hardest part of leaving; we’d truly built a new friendfamily in and around Folsom.  We hung out with our friendfamily on a practically continuous basis.   Leaving our friendfamily sucked.  When we come back, everyone’s kids will have stopped toddling and started playing soccer and it’s not going to be quite the same.  Even my family in Michigan – for whom I keep arguing the experience of Cynthia and I living in Taipei objectively won’t that much different from Cynthia and I living in California (i.e. we aren’t there but twice a year and we have to talk on the phone instead) – seemed to feel like they were loisng something.  So, in an effort to minimize the separation for all parties, writing about our lives hopefully helps everyone (including us) feel a little more connected.

Now, on to the travel journal.  I think I’ve write to many Powerpoint slides, because I feel like using bullets:

• Melotoin is a miracle jet lag cure with no side effects – just take 5mg before you are supposed to be sleeping.  I slept most of the flight, the first night on the ground I slept soundly till 7am, and my stomach has been calm.  This is not something my body has been capable of previously.
• Cell phones are stupid and my research on cell phones destroys money.  Despite assurances it would be lower, AT&T charged me $175 per phone to break my contracts in the US which had 2 months left on them.  Despite assurances they would work, the pre-paid T-Mobile phones I bought to maintain my US phone numbers don’t work in Taiwan.  Despite assurances that she could, Cynthia couldn’t get an  iPhone today until our government ID cards show up in two weeks.  Plus my new Blackberry doesn’t get activated by work until Monday.  In summary, we basically are without cell phones because I paid extra money to break them.  Jeff, I should have just gone with the original plan.  At least the land line phones at work and the apartment are working.
• The new apartment is excessively nice.  Everything is brand new ceiling to floor.  I spent half an hour yesterday peeling protective plastic off things.  The “new smell” is so strong I think it may become annoying.  I’ll post pictures once we have the place totally put together.
• California on the day we left: high 97F, low 60F, 17% humidity.  Taipei tomorrow:  High 80, low 77, 89% humidity.
• We bought a bunch of house stuff from IKEA yesterday, and food from Costco today.  How’s that for embracing the local culture?
• Since we can’t really cook yet (no pans, not enough pantry stock), we’re going to eat as many different cuisines as possible until our air shipment arrives. So far: USDA steak at Ruth’s Chris, and Mongolian BBQ.  I will keep you posted on this.
• Cable doesn’t get installed at the apartment until the end of the month, but I don’t think I have much interest in TV here anyway.  This is mostly because my Folsom-based Slingbox PRO-HD seems to be working awesome so far (knock on wood).
• We sold both our cars, and now take taxi’s everywhere.  I don’t miss them because, even though half of them were great cars, they weren’t the kind of cars you love. They’d be expensive and useless here anyway given the traffic.  When I was a kid, I subscribed to Car and Driver and used to salivate over cars.  When I own a car again someday, I hope it is salivation worthy.
• I’m starting work on Monday.
• I’m tired and going to sleep.

One more thing – you should be able to leave comments on the blog again.  I’m not sure how this got turned off, but now it’s fixed.

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