First Daze in Taipei

Monday morning local time, we made it to this beautiful East Asian Island and are learning what it means to be a foreigner in a strange new land. Leaving Seattle feels like eons ago. Mt. St. Helens made an appearence through the clouds to see us off. Our visits with family in LA went well enough besides me cutting it uncomfortably close in catching my connecting flight. Sorry to give Kelly a scare but JP, Sach and myself couldn't rush away from the best sushi restaurant in LA without one more piece of Albacore Tuna nigiri. The flight was uneventful besides some jostling turbulence at times. Right before we landed, the stewardesses were offering, what else, but discount cartons of smokes.

So we loaded up our carry-ons (just kidding) and landed in Taipei's International Airport. Somehow, China Airlines managed to first misplace 3 of our 4 bags, but lucky for us, they found them...covered top to bottom in laundry detergent that apparently exploded from someone else's checked luggage. No big deal. They offered to clean them.

We headed into the city to check into our hotel and visit with our new colleagues at NCREE. Our rooms weren't ready yet so Kelly and I walked to find a bank to exchange the ever dropping "Green Back" and get a bite to eat. 1 US dollar = 32 Nation Taiwanese Dollars (1$=32NT$) A young woman suggested we try a famous breakfast dish served by a near by vendor after spotting us wondering around like obvious foreigners. Through pointing and hand waving, and holding out money, we walked away with what we think was a fried dough with a fried egg on it and green onions.

Delicious! Our new digs are top notch at the Howard International House right near National Taiwan University, the Na'an Forest Park, and a number of Night Markets.

We showered and headed to NCREE to see the test set up and meet our new colleagues. The place is extremely impressive and has massive capabilities for large scale testing. You can see me here on the second floor above our new friends Hank and PC. We explored the facility and met with staff to get things rolling to test on December 7th.
"Safety first", right Kel. These guys here also set us up with bikes to get to and from work and to get around the city.



Taiwan, we learned, has the highest concentration of mopeds on Earth. This is totally believable because we've never seen anything like before. Here I am waiting at a typical traffic light.

The day and a half of travel caught up to us and we both crashed out early that night...as in 7pm for me and 8 for Kelly. This meant that we were both wide awake at 5am and ready to conquer the city. We enjoyed the early hours running at the local Da'an Forest Park were hundreds of elderly Taiwanese come to do Tai-Chi and chat. It was quite a sight.

We're going out exploring different night markets tonight and to see a few of the ancient Taoism temples lit up with lights. We're doing our best to learn as much Mandarin as we can to be polite and knowledgable when ordering food. The people here are super friendly and already we're seeing how awesome the food is (we've agreed that as long as we're running, we can eat as much as we'd like).

Zaijain ("Good-bye" in Mandarin)

Jake

And We're Off

We're leaving tomorrow morning on our way to Los Angeles and then to Taipei, Taiwan for 5 weeks for a research project related to our studies at University of Washington. The NCREE facility hosting the test has created a webpage designated to the project that will give some insight into what we'll be testing. http://exp.ncree.org/cbf/

JP Von Hitchburg and Sach will pick us up at the LAX airport and Kelly's Sister Marybeth and her Husband Ted have recently moved to LA, so we'll be able to spend our last day in the states with family. Then we'll take the long 14 hour flight across the Pacific to experience Taiwan (and Asia) for the first time. Though Kelly has both lived in and travel the South Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji), this will be my first trip over seas.

We're looking to keep our family and friends updated of our adventures with this blog and will continue to post with pictures and stories of the weeks events. You can also respond on the blog or to our emails. Hope everyone is doing well and we apologize if we weren't able to chat before we split. The last few weeks leading up to this has been incredibly busy tying up loose ends at UW, at home and in our personal lives. We've been looking forward to this trip and are excited for this opportunity UW and our research has given us.

We'll see everyone soon.