Taipei, Taiwan: First Impressions

Roger and I arrived in Taiwan yesterday night, and this being the first international adventure of mine in awhile I thought that a (long-overdue) blog post is definitely in order. We're here for three weeks visiting Roger's family, and our first destination is Taipei. We're staying with Roger's uncle and his wife in a lovely apartment building, one of many in the city. There are no houses here, just tall apartment buildings, since space is at a premium. The complex we're staying at boasts many amenities, including (but definitely not limited to), ping pong tables, private karaoke rooms, a mah jong room with about eight tables, a swimming pool and hot tub, and a library. It's pretty sweet, and I definitely have plans to drag Roger into the hot tub before too long.

It's cold (well, at least by Texas standards: Yankees go ahead and laugh, but I'm cold at 50 degrees now!) and rainy here, which is apparently unusual for the winter. The mountains surrounding the city are mostly shrouded in fog, and everything is green! It's great to see some green after the Texan lack thereof, and there is enough ridiculously lush foliage to satisfy my urge for such things for quite awhile, I think.

We've been here for less than 24 hours, but there's already been enough cool/strange things to merit a bullet-point list, so here goes!

-The Greyhoundesque/tourist buses are likely to be bright pink/green/blue and/or brighly lit at night. In fact this aesthetic (bright colors, flashing lights) seems to be pretty much the norm.
-There are SO. MANY. SCOOTERS. And bikes. And cars, for that matter. But especially scooters.
-The garbage trucks all play Fur Elise, in the manner of ice cream trucks stateside. (A friendly reminder to bring out the garbage perhaps?)
-The work crews have extremely creepy human-headed hard hat-wearing mechanical flag-waving dummies posted to alert drivers.
-There is Christmas here. Or at least the decorations and music. And I thought I would be escaping that this year...
-The keyboard on which I'm typing is a dual English/Chinese keyboard. I would type a bit of Chinese to demonstrate, but it seems you actually have to know what you're doing for it to work (lame!).
-It seems that Rosetta Stone actually gave me the tools to understand enough so that I sort of know what's going on in a conversation about half the time (which is very impressive, mind you). Yay Rosetta Stone!
-We've been eating fresh guava pretty much non-stop since arriving, and other culinary delights have included ginger candy and dried peppers from China, homemade beef noodle soup, and hot fruit tea (think sangria tea, it's fabulous!).

For pictures/proof that those creepy construction worker dummies actually exist, check out Roger's flickr page. More to come soon!