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!