Hello from Taiwan

Oh my goodness so much to blog about so little time. Or rather, so few compos brain cells with which to string a sentence together.

Day one in Kaohsieng, Taiwan, where we have come to spend some QT with the wild in-laws. The flight was pretty much what you would expect for fifteen hours encased in an oversized lipstick tube with not one but two toddlers (who, to be fair, (a) did some entertaining of each other, bless their snot-encrusted little selves and (b) slept a larger percentage of the time than I had dared hope). We read (the verb is used loosely, here) the three books we had brought with us over and over and over again; we obsessively pointed out examples of our two favourite things: flowers (on the China Airlines logo, in the SkyBoutique catalogue) and cats (in our books, on some wrapping paper that babydaddy had wrapped some little boredom-battling gifties for the girls in, and in our jetlagged hallucinatory one year old brains), we dropped our pacifiers down various unsavoury crevices in the aeroplane, we crapped spectacularly… all in all, a good time. I will say that, while it is kind of the airlines to allow you to save money by having a child on your lap up until age two, it is a very, very good use of money to buy them their own seat.

We staggered off the plane in Taipei and miraculously made our puddlejumper connection to Kaohsiung (the English spelling of which I had always imagined as “Gauchon,” with a vaguely francophone pronounciation, but alas, no), where we were not met by the in-laws, who hadn’t made it to the airport in time, so we stood around with our luggage wondering what to do and marvelling at the gigantic line at the Bank of Taiwan kiosk. Apparently in honour of the Year of the Dragon (what it is about to be), the Bank of Taiwan has issued special Dragon Coins, which can be yours for the low low price of about thirty US dollars, and not only do lots and lots of people want these, they want them _enough_ to trek all the way out to the airport to get them, on the theory that the line at the airport bank will be shorter. Suckahz….

The wild in-laws turned up in a borrowed minivan not long after, and I started to get that sort of surreal floaty feeling that you get when you are super super tired and other people are doing things that wouldn’t make sense even if you weren’t really jetlagged, viz, spend fortyfive minutes trying to install the carseats for the kids into the minivan (the nonsensical part was why they hadn‘t installed the carseats before they had four exhausted adults and two wound-up toddlers and world-record breaking quantities of luggage to cram into the car). For the uninitiated, toddler carseats are gigantic contraptions with lots of buckles and straps and places to adjust and each model is different and in this case, someone had threaded the straps through some holes that it turned out were not the right holes to begin with, and installing one really is a project best accomplished by one person with a clear head & an instruction manual, rather than seven people each of whose child-car-seat-installation experience was inversely proportional to the amount of sleep they’d had in the preceding twentyfour hours & their confidence in their ability to correctly install a carseat.

Once we were on the road (hurrah!) there was a brief threat to go out to breakfast before going home for a shower & a stuff-dump, but there are some things I am massively inflexible about, and taking a shower after a sixteen hour flight with an incontinent toddler and my period (wheeee!) is one of them. So back to the apartment, which is in a 1970‘s era block of condos overlooking the River of Love (!). More later, as babydaddy has just returned with nappies and milk and BREAKFAST!