Taiwan--Day 1

We have less than 38 hours until we meet Alex.  We are getting so close!

We made it to Taiwan!  There were times during the flight from LA that I wasn't sure we would.  We ate dinner at 3:00 in the morning, and they turned the lights out for everyone to sleep.  It seemed like hours must have passed as I slept.  My knees ached.  My bottom hurt from sitting, and it was only 4:30--Ten more hours to go.  We arrived at 6:45 AM Taipei time.

Our agency had arranged for a driver, Danny to pick us up and take us to a hotel so we could freshen up before our train ride to Tainan.  He was really looking out for us.  Before he left us, he made certain we knew what time our train left (our agency had bought our tickets and left them at the hotel desk) and what time we would need to get a taxi.

As it turned out, our tickets were for 4:30 PM, which meant we had to kill the whole day.  We walked around a bit, ate lunch at Subway, then decided to be tourists.  We took a taxi to the National Palace Museum and spent a few hours looking around at the incredible handcrafted pieces that date back thousands of years.

The high speed train ride to Tainan takes about 2 hours.  It was fun to see the countryside, but we could barely keep our eyes open.  At home, it would have been the middle of the night.  The good news is that we didn't sleep through our stop.  A man outside the exit very excitedly found a taxi for us to deliver us to the Tainan Hotel.  

A note about taxis--we are from a small town.  We know nothing about taxis--how to hail them, how much to tip a driver...But we've learned one thing very quickly from our few taxi rides today.  The cost sure adds up.  The nice part is that they deliver you right where you need to go.  I'm not sure I'm up to figuring out a bus schedule in Chinese!

Once in Tainan, we went in search of dinner.  We ate at Wan Ke Lou Restaurant.  We chose it, because it was very clean, very crowded, and besides, it was one of the few places that had English terms on its menu.  It's nice to know what you're getting.  

And now we are back in the room figuring out the computer.  Leigh discovered one problem.  His computer uses a 3-prong plug, and all the outlets here just have 2.  He found a way to make it work with an extension cord they have for the TV here, but unless we can find an adaptor, we might lose our ability to use the computer when we leave this hotel.