Farewell to Taiwan

Yes, I know, I've been home since late Friday night (or early Saturday morning, depending on how you like to call it). But I still have a few more pictures, so this will be my last Taiwan post.

Pathetic, I know. Stuck for a topic in my drab daily life? Why, yes!

The lovely ladies in sales took me out for lunch on Thursday, my last full day in Taiwan. In keeping with my usual policy of respecting the privacy of my co-workers, there will not be a picture of the beautiful ladies, probably much to the chagrin of any male readers I might have.

I didn't take individual pictures of all the dishes, but it was quite the smorgasbord for just the four of us: dumplings, soup, veggies, hand-cut pasta, and a roll with beef and green onions. Seriously, you never leave a table hungry in this country.


I did take a separate picture of the dumplings, since they simply didn't fit in the previous picture. The entire lunch was delicious, but as usual, there was far more food than could be eaten by the people present. In this case, there were three tiny Asian women and me. The food won.

When I got back to my hotel Thursday evening, I noticed these little guys sitting on a sideboard. Somehow I'd missed them for the last week and a half. You couldn't look at them without smiling, so I thought I'd bring back a picture of them.

I also brought back something else to the hotel to make me smile. Yep, that's right -- this is the best bubble tea in Taiwan, at least as far as I discovered. Yum! Now I have to try all the places in Austin to see if anything comes remotely close to this. They even gave me a purple straw.

On Friday, there was some fairly serious rain near the hotel. It turns out it's pretty hard to get a decent picture of rain if you're not willing to get your camera out in it, which I wasn't. I took several pictures, and this was the best of the bunch. The rain was heavy enough that the resulting water was up over the curbs and almost into the shops near the hotel... but when I got to work, it wasn't raining at all, nor did I see rain the rest of the day, including in Taipei for my flight out. Go figure. 'Round these parts we'd call that a "locally heavy storm."

We got a tiny little shower today thanks to Dolly, but nothing like that picture. I would have been happy with more, as dry as this summer has been, but I'm grateful for what we got today.