Days 1 & 2: Our FIRST Journey to Taiwan Begins!

We are off on our first family trip to Taiwan this summer!  We're spending about a month living in an apartment in Taipei.  It's going to be my clan of 6 plus Agong and Ama.  Agong and B will leave after 10 days (*sniff sniff*) and then Ama and the rest of us will stay on til the end of the month.  The kids are enrolled in half-day afternoon Chinese classes Mondays through Fridays, so we'll have plenty of time to enjoy city life and explore Taipei as well as some other parts of Taiwan.  We are SO excited to eat delicious food, meet and visit family, and explore a totally different country!!  

5/31/18: Our trip started with an early morning flight to San Francisco.  After 4 hours, we landed and waited to meet up with Agong and Ama.  We played and had some lunch, then got on our big plane to Taiwan!  We watched movies, ate not-so-yummy-plane food...

took some uncomfortable naps...

did some homework...

...and after 13 hours we landed in TAIWAN on 6/1/18!!  Yay!

What I learned on this trip is that the trays are WAY too small.  There's just not enough space for a drink and something else and the ability to get things from your bag under the seat.  We had about 3 spills...by Evie, me, and Eulee.  Wow.  Let me just say that this was the first time since we've been flying with these kids that I've had to use our just-in-case clothes that I packed in our carry-on.  I was so thankful I packed Eulee extra bottoms because her bum was soaked with Sprite on this flight!  

We dropped off our luggage in our apartment and headed to Shida Night Market to find some food.  

We've been watching lots of YouTube videos about night markets so the kids were super excited to see one.  When we got there, Eli said, "Whoa!  This is SO cool!!"  He just couldn't believe there were so many people walking around late at night (and this is a smaller night market!).  We ate some braised pork rice bowls (my all-time fave Taiwanese food item), noodles and chow fun...what a great way to start our trip!  (FYI: It's definitely hard to find seating for all 8 of us at a night market!)

Our apartment is close to the National Taiwan Normal University (aka Shida), so there are lots of students and non-Taiwanese people around.  Here is our alley...

...which leads to our front door...

For Taipei standards, our apartment is really big.  It's old, but remodeled.  We have a nice living room (notice how we are all on a device of some sort)...

We have 3 bedrooms and a futon in the living room as well.  One of the bathrooms even has a shower stall, so it's more Western than some.  Usually the shower and toilet and sink area are all shared with a drain in the middle of the bathroom.  This is always my least favorite part of Taiwan because the floor always seems wet.  The beds are rock hard, but we can't complain because our bedrooms are fairly roomy and we have a full kitchen.

The kids are getting used to having to separate out recyclables, compost, and regular trash.  Things are really strict on this island because, after all, it IS an island.  The kids have also learned not to leave food or crumbs out...because ants and cockroaches are normal here.  We've been lucky though because so far we haven't seen too many cockroaches (being on the 1st floor we would expect more)...although one DID find its way into Eli's backpack because he had spilled some Pringles in there. Ick!  I don't even want to think about it anymore.

After we ate dinner our first night, everyone managed to pass out around midnight...except for me.  I stayed up til 3:30am, read my book for an hour and finally went to sleep.  But I was back up at 6:30am when Eulee came walking in.  It'll take a little while for me...but I'm glad the kids are bouncing back pretty well!