Celebrating the New Year in Vietnam

To celebrate the Chinese New Year, the Ince family decided to head to Northern Vietnam. We took a two and a half hour flight from Taipei directly to Hanoi. Upon boarding the flight, we immediately began to sense the excitement and anticipation that folks were feeling as they were getting closer to being with their families to celebrate the holiday. Many a gift bag was being pushed and squeezed into the plane's tiny overhead compartments. It was fun vicariously feel, via our fellow passengers, the joy that often accompanies a long awaited home coming.

Once we arrived in Hanoi, we discovered a noisy, bustling, somewhat crowded city whose colorfully decorated, store-lined streets entice the visitor to explore. We discovered a fantastic vegetarian restaurant in the Old Quarter and enjoyed many a cyclo ride to the establishment for any of breakfast, lunch or dinner. The highlight of our time in Hanoi was certainly the visit to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. We learned a lot about Vietnam's modern day history and were struck at how much of this recent history the country had spent in the throes of one war after another.

After a couple of days in Hanoi, we headed for a day trip to the mystical Halong Bay. The scenery from our boat was breathtaking as we weaved around the bay's 400 plus limestone formations that rose from below the water's placid surface and towered high above us. We had a lovely ship board meal, freshly prepared by the ship captain's wife. The girls really enjoyed visiting one of the bay's floating villages, fully outfitted with a floating market, school, and hospital.

The final day's of our Vietnam journey were spent in the northern mountain town of Sapa. Getting to Sapa from Hanoi involved an overnight train trip. Six of us stayed in one sleeper berth, with two sets of "bunk bed" style cots. It was a tight fit and the ride slightly terrifying, as the train often felt like it was flying off, if not over, some very bumpy, mountainside tracks.
We spent a day trekking into a hillside tribal village belonging to a Black H'Mong community. Everyone was welcoming, immediately willing to serve as our guides, and our girls made some fast friends a long the way!

What is that smell?

Okay, so in my last posting I was boasting about all of the amazing tofu products that one can find in Taiwan, I had not yet come across one preparation that maybe a little less than amazing. We were eating in a pretty upscale Chinese restaurant, enjoying our after church Sunday lunch, when all of a sudden we smelled poop! Avery's and my first thought was that Ayo, our four year old, had had an accident, so I found myself pulling at the back of her pants trying to find the offending source. Despite Ayo's protestations, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it," the smell was so like horse manure, we were convinced that such an accident had surely happened. When no accident could be found, and Ayo was now indignantly glaring at us both, Avery and I concluded that someone must have stepped in dog excrement and tracked it into the restaurant. We called over a waitress so that we could inform her of our conclusion, hoping that she would come up with a socially acceptable way to find the offending pair of shoes and remedy the situation. You can imagine our surprise when she simply began to laugh out load and point to the food on the table next to us, as we expressed our concern/distress at the ever growing stench. "Stinky tofu, stinky tofu" she exclaimed, thus identifying the source of the smell. There at the table next to us was a very normal appearing family of four digging into a plate of tofu cubes. Our first encounter with the highly recommended Taiwanese delicacy "stenching tofu", also known as stinky tofu, proved to be such an assault to our olfactory senses that none of us could ever imagine even sampling it. We'll let you know if that changes as many of our Taiwanese friends insist that it is a gastronomical delight not to be missed.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Hello and Happy Year of the Ox!

Well, the Ince family has been in Taiwan for about two and a half months and is feeling quite settled, so much so that I finally have enough free time to blog.


We arrived in Taipei on November 17th (the above picture is of the girls at the Taipei airport after a 20 hour flight) and proceeded to move into our new apartment on the same day. Everything went very smoothly, as seems to be the Taiwanese way. The movers met us at our new apartment within two hours of our landing in Taipei and had all of our belongings delivered and unpacked into our new apartment five hours later. They even removed all of the box/tape/ packing paper garbage! Thank You to Asian Tigers (moving company) for the great service.

Taiwan is proving itself to be interesting, inviting, and an overall great place in which to reside. The Taiwanese people are very friendly and are generally open to meeting and conversing with visitors. They are eager to learn where you are from, how long you will be here and why you came to Taiwan. I have started taking Chinese classes at the Tapei Language Institute in Tien Mu (the section of Taipei in which we live). The classes meet from 9AM to noon, Monday through Friday. I have two classmates, a young woman from Japan and a fellow from Australia. While the class is intense and demanding, it is incredibly fun to feel as if I am actually progressing towards my goal of being able to converse with and understand my new neighbors in their own language.

The streets of Taipei are colorful and bustling, but do not feel overly crowded or frenetic like the streets of other large Asian cities (e.g. Hong Kong, Bangkok) that we have visited. The winter weather is quite mercurial, one day the weather can be in the 70s-80s, and then a several days long cold spell will hit with temperatures in the 40s-50s.

Food is plentiful, fantastic and cheap. The open air produce markets are filled with exotic and not so exotic fresh and great tasting fruits and vegetables. Also, for us vegetarians, Taipei is heaven on earth. The Taiwanese have elevated the preparation of soy/tofu edibles to an art form. The variety of tofu/soy products is vast: tofu fish, tofu pork, tofu chicken, soy shrimp, soy sushi, and on and on.


I hope I have already said enough to make you all want to come and visit. Meat eaters, don't worry, there is evidently some of the best tasting chicken in the world to be found right here in Taiwan!