Greetings from the Far East

So, it's Taiwan here and I made it in one piece. It was kind of a hectic trip full of the usual rigamorales of international travel. BTW, a 13 and a half hour plane ride sucks. It just does. Doesn't matter what class of what airline, being forced to spend so much time on a vehicle that 1.) doesn't allow you to stretch, 2.) doesn't allow you to move (outside of walking up and down the aisles), and 3.) by all rights shouldn't be able to stay in the air, sucks.

Anyway, it's my first real day in Taiwan. We (me and my mom) arrived yesterday at 10:30 pm, spent an hour and a half in the airport getting baggage, getting out, finding transportation (if you're going to travel, try not to arrive at 10 pm on Monday night. Nobody really has time in their schedules to accomodate that), and getting back. It was like 1 in the morning by the time before we were even in my uncle's house. Still, it was kind of fun being here and being around everything. The weather here is (as my aunt told me) mysteriously warm. It was winter weather like 2 days ago but then it just bumped into early summer (early NorCal summer) weather. Plus, there's forever a sort of musky (you know that feeling atomospheric feeling like when somebody uses too much cologne or perfume?) humidity that hangs in the air here.

As it stands, we plan on doing a bunch of stuff here so I should probably get off the computer so that we can go out and start doing the shopping thing (I know! First day and we're already shopping). I'll try to blog often these next 2 weeks. If nothing else, it'll be a good record for me to keep track of what I've been doing here. (Oh, and I'm manually setting the time stamps to reflect current Taiwan time. So, don't be surprised when the thing says January 17th, for example.)