Did you miss any of the earlier posts in this series? Find them here:

Today was another really good day! I “went” to the online service for my church, House of Blessing. The whole thing was really good, but the most meaningful part to me was the song “Here Again”. (This link is to a different but also excellent version, in case you just want to listen to the song without searching through the whole church service for it.) I’d heard and sung it many times, but the lyrics were never so meaningful as they were to me today, shut in a room away from everyone and everything as I am:

I’m not enough/Unless you come./Will you meet me here again?/’Cause all I want Is all you are./Will you meet me here again?/Not for a minute/Was I forsaken./The Lord is in this place./The Lord is in this place./Come, Holy Spirit,/Dry bones awaken./The Lord is in this place./The Lord is in this place.

Later I finished up some other tasks on my to-do list and finally had time for something I’d wanted to do since I arrived: working on my new series (working title: The Wolves of Cedar Crossing – yes, it’s about werewolves!). That is, I didn’t actually start drafting the series yet, but I read back through some of the many ideas about characters and plot that I’d brainstormed a while back and organized them more logically. Now I have a better idea of what needs to happen in book one. I hope to work on it a little every day for the rest of my quarantine and hopefully actually start drafting some scenes before I leave.

Here are today’s meals:

Breakfast: the usual hard-boiled egg and greens, plus chicken nuggets and a couple of rolls. One of the rolls had a sweet red bean filling. And don’t forget the “mixed fruits and vegetables juice drink” (I could taste the veggies as well as the fruits)!
Lunch (clockwise from top left): bitter melon (I think – it was bitter and in the plant family, anyway), greens (surprise, surprise), scrambled eggs with raw green onions, pork, a seasoned chicken leg on rice, and a piece of steamed pumpkin in the middle. I think the pumpkin was my favorite, if only because it was the first time it had shown up in any of my quarantine meals. Let’s just say that barley tea never makes my list of favorites.
Dinner (clockwise from top left): greens (bet you’re surprised!), stewed pork with carrots and broccoli, some sort of spring rolls on rice, green beans, and I have no idea what that was in the middle. It was soft and ginger-flavored. The spring rolls were really good, and so was the broccoli – tender and very flavorful. I wouldn’t have minded a second helping of that.

I settled down to dinner with my Kindle, but after reading for a few minutes, I decided that God’s art gallery outside was much more interesting than the book. The sky kept changing as clouds drifted across the setting sun, turning gold at the edges as the sky turned orange. The picture doesn’t really show how awesome it was, so you’ll have to take my word for it!

See later posts in the series here (once they’re live):

Did you miss any of the earlier posts in this series? Find them here:

Today seemed to go by fast (which was nice!). Three separate video calls with family used up pretty much all the morning. Some editing, some work on my Amazon ads, some exercise (Dance Dance Revolution for the win!), and some lesson planning for the after-school classes I’ll be teaching this year used up the afternoon. As usual, working on my blog post is my after-dinner activity. And then I’m off to bed with one more day of quarantine under my belt!

This building, just visible to my far left as I peer out my window, intrigues me. During the day, it usually looks like a normal, solid, white building with a dark gray striped design in the middle. But after dark, it manages to look as though it’s shaped kind of like an arch, with the enter part completely open (you know, like all those buildings in Hong Kong designed with the big holes so that dragons from the mountains can fly through them at night on their way to drink from the harbor … never mind). A few irregular little lights in the gray part somehow look as though they’re on buildings behind this one, adding to the night-time illusion that the center section is empty. (Or is it an illusion? I’m not completely convinced!) And on a foggy day, the white part fades into the mist, making it look as though a tall, narrow, dark gray structure stands there instead. I’m beginning to wonder if someone purposely designed this building to provide hours of perplexity for stir-crazy inmates peering out at the city from their solitary cells and trying to keep reality and their imagination separate. Then again, is it worth even trying to keep them separate? Some days I’m not so sure …

Ok, time for the obligatory meal photos. Today I actually really enjoyed parts of both lunch and dinner! A couple of the items were actually my favorites out of everything we’ve been served so far.

Breakfast: the usual green leafy veggies and hard-boiled egg (but this time I actually had salt to put on it, thanks to yesterday’s delivery from my friends!). The thin meaty thing pretending to be bacon wasn’t bad, and I always like the almost-hashbrown patties with ketchup. I would like to also draw your attention to the large glutinous blob at the bottom right. I have no idea what it was this morning, but I’m pretty sure that in a past life it was part of the landscape on an alien planet, or perhaps a prop in a low-budget sci-fi movie that took place on said alien planet.
Lunch. Those breaded shrimp things were delicious! I wouldn’t mind a couple of those every day! Spare me the lecture about how fattening they are, please. I’m pretty sure we’ve had at least one deep-fried item in every meal so far, so it’s not like they’re much worse than anything else. The greens were tastier than usual, too – good and garlicky, just the way I like them, not bitter like most greens here have been so far. The mushrooms in the center section were pretty good, too. The dark little strips at the top right I’m pretty sure were ni the fungus family too, but I didn’t care for them much. One bite was plenty. I didn’t eat the chicken wing with the green pepper pork, either, but the shrimp made up for the rest of it. Oh, and the white gourd tea? Just look at the squash in the picture, imagine it turned to liquid with sugar added, and that’s exactly how it tasted.
Dinner: chicken curry with potatoes and carrots over rice. What a delightful change from the norm! This was definitely my favorite hotel dinner yet. I mixed the greens in with the curry and couldn’t even taste their bitterness. I wasn’t going to eat the deep-fried breaded pork slab, because deep-fried, but I took one bite and decided it was too good to let it go to waste. (I couldn’t say the same about the slab of tofu.) Even the soup was pretty tasty. It had some kind of vegetable blossom (squash?) in it, which I know sounds weird, but it worked. The broth had a pleasant flavor. I had promised my Kindle we would have a dinner date this evening, so all in all, the meal was quite delightful.

Anyway, here are some pictures from tonight’s sunset. The sun itself stayed hidden behind a cloud bank most of the way down, but the evening sky was still pretty. I’m so thankful for a room with nice big windows and a sunset view!

See later posts in the series here (once they’re live):

Did you miss any of the earlier posts in this series? Find them here:

Today was a good day! One of the first things I did was chat online with a colleague of mine who just started her quarantine on a different floor of the HiOne Hotel. Her wonderful attitude encouraged me, and so did the song she sent me a link to. “As the Deer” instantly became my quarantine theme song. I’ve heard it dozens, if not hundreds of times before, but it had never brought me to tears before. Of course, I’d never before listened to it when locked in a room alone for two weeks … and yet not alone. The phrase “you alone” takes on a whole new meaning when the Lord is all you have – and you realize he is really all you need after all. I can’t remember the last time a song touched me that deeply.

Stormy Morning in Taichung

The picture above is what I saw when I opened my curtains. Typhoon In-Fa is hanging out off the east coast at the moment. Rain splattered my window, “falling” almost horizontally at the time. All day, there have been intermittent heavy winds, sometimes making my windowpanes rattle, and it’s rained on and off.

This morning when I opened my door to pick up my breakfast, I stuck my phone out and took a couple of quick pictures. Below is the view from my doorway. For some reason I always feel a little sad when I see all those other chairs with meals on them. I’ve never glimpsed any of the other guests/inmates here (though this afternoon I heard someone sneeze on the other side of the wall), but every chair represents a person sitting in a room by themselves. There are at least eight of us spending our two weeks in solitary confinement in this hallway, so close together and yet each completely alone. I hope the others have found meaningful ways to fill their time and connect with friends and family in the outside world, as I’ve been able to.

This chair just to the right of my door is where my meals magically show up. You can see from the stains that a lot of previous guests’ meals must have leaked! None of mine have, as far as I’ve noticed.

Here’s what I see to the left of my room. Floyd’s room is the one where you see that distant chair on the left side of the hall. The elevator we came up in is just beyond it.

A highlight of my day was receiving a delivery in the late afternoon!

Part of it involved items from my apartment (like extra clothes, so I won’t have to do as much laundry in the sink) that a friend who has the key had been willing to get for me. She also bought me some fresh fruit, yogurt, and a few other goodies. The rest of it was the delicious dinner that you see below, a gift from another friend. Yum! It was definitely the best meal (and the healthiest – nothing was deep fried!!) that I’ve had since I’ve been here.

This delicious dinner consisted of a blueberry-filled bagel, fresh cut veggies and dip, and chicken over rice (with half a hard-boiled egg and a few other ingredients mixed in).

Meanwhile, here are the meals the hotel served today:

Breakfast: French fries, some sort of glutinous pastry (the spiral pattern went all the way through), barley tea, a hard-boiled egg, those sausages I’d been hoping wouldn’t return to haunt me, and greens.
Lunch: the ubiquitous greens, shrimp with bean sprouts, a chicken leg on rice, soft squishy squash with rice noodles, and eggplant. The eggplant was a tasty change!
This is the dinner the hotel provided. I didn’t eat most of it, since I had the other one. I did try one of those little things in the round center section, just out of curiosity. It turned out to be chewy tofu sprinkled with sesame seeds. Oh, and I had the pieces of pork at the bottom left – they were tender, flavorful, delicious, and very fatty. (Have you noticed that fatty pork in various forms, tofu, and greens have been a recurring theme in these meals?)

One last picture before I close for the night. I didn’t actually see the sunset this evening because of all the clouds over the horizon, but it did make its presence known very briefly in this gorgeous display. Just a few seconds after I took this picture, the clouds shifted and the colors vanished.

God’s artwork at dusk.

See later posts in the series here (once they’re live):

Did you miss either of the earlier posts in this series? Find them here:

The highlight of my day today was being able to do a fun new form of exercise! I had bought a very basic version of Dance Dance Revolution long ago but hadn’t seen or thought of it for years. Then this summer I rediscovered it up in the closet in my grandparents’ house. Since the dance pad plugs directly into a TV, with no other equipment required, I thought it would be a perfect quarantine activity that I could do in my hotel room. So we brought it along, along with spare batteries, even though it’s a little on the heavy side and we had limited space and weight to spare in our luggage. When we first arrived in the hotel, however, it looked as though it wasn’t going to work right with the TV in my room. So Floyd went online and ordered something from PCHome that would help it connect. The something arrived and got delivered to my room today, and after a lot of fiddling and some tech support from Floyd over a video call, we discovered to my disappointment that it didn’t work. And THEN we discovered that the dance pad could connect to the TV the way it needed to after all, with no external help required! I was delighted, and spent the next hour dancing away! I’m really excited to know that I have DDR to look forward to every day now for the rest of my quarantine! (Hey, when you’re locked in a room alone for two weeks, you have to find excitement where you can!)

Here are today’s meals:

Breakfast: slightly sweet rolls with a red bean filling, hard-boiled egg, chicken nuggets with ketchup, and green salad, plus strawberry milk tea.
Lunch, clockwise from top left: greens, a chicken leg sitting on little pork strips mixed with something that looked like bits of onion but wasn’t, breaded pork slab on rice, something very moist and squishy that I’m pretty sure was in the vegetable family (only because it didn’t taste meaty and was definitely not mineral). The item in the middle involved a different kind of greens and something else unidentifiable but spicy. I stuck the boxed drink in the fridge without opening it. Maybe I’ll try it at some point if I’m desperate for a change from water.
Dinner: a deep-fried, breaded something-or-other that I thought at first was pork but wasn’t. It involved a slightly sweet paste that I believe may have been some sort of seafood in a past life. Also squash, an egg (not sure why it was that color – that’s the white you see, not the shell) and fried noodles. And clear soup with what I assumed were fishballs but weren’t. Perhaps some distant relative of the dumpling? (That is, Western dumplings, not the Chinese kind.)

There’s a typhoon moving in at the moment. It’s been raining on and off all day, interspersed with blue skies overhead but fast-moving dark clouds traveling south just above the horizon. My window panes have occasionally rattled in the wind, and when I stand near the door, I hear the wind whistling through some window that must have been left ajar somewhere down the hall. I wonder what it will be like in the next couple of days to watch a typhoon hit the city from the 22nd floor.

I’ll close with this photo I took out my window this evening of the storm closing in on the city at dusk.

See later posts in the series here (once they’re live):

Did you miss the first post in this series? Find it here:

I woke up this morning feeling joyful and grateful, thinking of how much I have to be thankful for. Yes, I’m going to be stuck in this room for the next fortnight, but at least it’s a pretty nice room! Want to see for yourself? Come take the tour!

I’ve wanted to learn to line dance for years. What better time than quarantine? This morning I learned the Cowboy Hustle! I have just enough space between the beds and desk in my hotel room to do it, as long as I skip the part where they keep turning around to face another direction. I plan to learn a new line dance each day I’m here. I’m so thankful for enough room to exercise, and for a fun variety of exercise options on Youtube!

Alas, the person in the room below mine apparently doesn’t feel quite the same way. Midway through my second exercise session of the day, the room phone rang. It was a lady from the front desk, asking if I could please exercise more quietly. Whoops.

A doorbell I didn’t know I had rang this morning. When I put on my mask and peeked out, lo and behold, a care package was waiting for me! What a delightful surprise to find these treats from some of my colleagues at Morrison Academy! (They had to leave the bag at the front desk, and a worker in a mask, gloves, and hospital gown brought it up and left it outside my room, then hurried away to safety as soon as he rang my bell.)

Opening the package brought tears to my eyes. It’s so nice to be loved and cared for, especially when you’re alone!
A closeup of the cookies in the care package!

In the late morning, I got a call on the room phone here in my hotel. “Hello, this is the front desk. The police are on the phone and would like to talk to you.” Fortunately, I knew what it was about, otherwise I might have been quite alarmed! It was just Olivia, my friendly neighborhood quarantine officer, trying to get ahold of me since we’d gotten cut off on our previous call on my new cellphone. She reminded me to keep track of my health and be ready to fill in the details when I get a text message tomorrow (and every day from then on, I think?), and that she would call me every two or three days to check in.

This evening there was a gorgeous sunset. My pictures don’t really do it justice, but they’ll give you a little hint of God’s artwork outside my window.

I thought this looked pretty awesome …
… until it got a little darker and more clouds rolled in, and the view turned to this!

It’s almost time for bed now. First, pictures of today’s meals:

Breakfast: a turnip cake with sauce, hashbrowns with ketchup, greens, sausages remarkable for their total absence of any sort of flavor, a hard-boiled egg, and mixed fruit and veggie juice.
Lunch: greens, cabbage, tofu, fatty but flavorful porky things on rice, a chicken wing, more of that soft squash, fishballs (I think), and barley tea.
Dinner: greens, tofu, asparagus stems with a piece of chicken, bitter melon, a different kind of fatty porky thing on rice, and clear soup with no discernable ingredients or taste.

As I end my day, my sports watch tells me I’ve walked (well, and it’s probably including my line dancing) a total of 10,016 steps today. I feel accomplished! Don’t be too impressed, though – today was about three days long!

See later posts in the series here (once they’re live):

My husband Floyd and I have just returned home to Taiwan after a summer in California visiting relatives. Taiwan is taking the current COVID situation very seriously, and all incoming travelers are now required to quarantine in a hotel for two weeks upon arrival. I decided to record my quarantine experiences for anyone who might be interested (and to give myself one more thing to do in what I’m calling my luxury incarceration)! Today is day 0, because the 14 days don’t technically start until tomorrow. (They have to be 14 full days.)

Both our flights (LA to Hong Kong; Hong Kong to Taipei) were fairly empty. Getting through the Taipei airport was an interesting adventure, very different from any of our previous arrivals. First I had to buy a Taiwan SIM card for my new phone (required for all incoming quarantinees), which was pretty simple since they had a table selling them right after we got off the plane. There was a short line for that – the only line we had to stand in the whole time. Then there was a huge hassle about how to access and take screenshots of certain messages and quarantine-related documents on both Floyd’s and my phones, but some helpful airport personnel who sort of spoke English were finally able to help us.

Next we had to walk all over the place, always with uniformed personnel standing ready to point out the way, and always being followed by a masked and gowned cleaning crew spraying disinfectant and wiping the floors down behind us. After getting through customs and immigration as usual, we picked up our boxes and duffel bag from the baggage claim, where a sign informed us what had been done to them.

I did indeed open my duffel bag later to find that some items were damp, but since there was no smell of disinfectant, I think that had more to do with the rain in Hong Kong on our layover.

Along with showing our phone screenshots and other extra info at extra places, we had to take rapid COVID tests (these were in addition to the PCR tests we took a few days ago that actually let us fly). For these ones, we were escorted to private booths where we had to spit in jars, wipe down the outsides of the jars, double-bag them, and hand them to more masked and gowned personnel, who stuck big “quarantine Taiwan” stickers on our shoulders to prove we had completed that step.

Finally we were funneled outside to the quarantine taxi waiting area, where we had to submit documentation about our quarantine hotel arrangements and then get sprayed down with sanitizer, along with our bags. (All of that took almost two hours, even though, as I said, there were pretty much no lines. Actually, the whole airport was almost deserted.) To our disappointment, they had run out of the van-sized taxis, and the regular ones couldn’t fit all our luggage (three large boxes and a duffel bag, plus carryons and a few other small items). So we had to pay for two taxis, which dropped us and our things off at the HiOne Gallery quarantine hotel in Taichung.

checking in at the HiOne Gallery Hotel
Floyd checking in at the HiOne Gallery Hotel. Not all our luggage would fit on that cart.

Checking into the hotel was complicated. It didn’t help that neither of us speaks much Chinese, and the man trying to check us in didn’t speak English. There were all sorts of COVID- and quarantine-related things to deal with as part of the check-in process, too. We would never have managed without calling a couple bilingual friends of ours and asking them to translate over the phone! All this happened outside and in the entryway, with the expansive lobby standing empty, tape on the floor showing potentially contaminated guests like us which way to walk to the elevator so we wouldn’t contaminate anything else.

A sign on the front door.
The HiOne Gallery Hotel lobby, with no other guests in sight. (Since it's a quarantine hotel, "regular" guests aren't allowed, and none of the quarantinees are allowed to leave their rooms.)
The HiOne Gallery Hotel lobby, with no other guests in sight. (Since it’s a quarantine hotel, “regular” guests aren’t allowed, and none of the quarantinees are allowed to leave their rooms.)

Though it will be hard to spend the next two weeks alone (no, husbands and wives aren’t even allowed to quarantine together!), I’m grateful for how nice my room is. I had very little idea of what to expect, but it’s better than I dared hope for. Tomorrow I’ll post a little video of my room.

A lot has been said (and wondered) by various people about the meals that are included in the cost of most quarantine hotels here. I decided to take pictures of each meal to include in my blog, for anyone who might be curious.

This lunch was waiting for me on a chair outside my door when I arrived in mid-afternoon. Rice, pork in sauce, a slab of breaded pork, anise-flavored tofu, and scrambled eggs with green onions.
Tonight’s dinner. Clockwise from top right: breaded chicken (basically chicken nuggets), ham-like pork strips on rice, pork with celery, bok choi, and in the middle we have that soft kind of squash that often gets put in soups here (not sure what it’s called) with rice noodles. Oh, and clear broth on the side, with tomato pieces.

That’s all for now. It’s time for bed. Here’s hoping jetlag will let me sleep!

See later posts in the series here (once they’re live):

 (To read Part I of my adventures on this scenic little island, whose name is pronounced “shauw lee oh cho”, click here.)

It’s 6:00 a.m., and I’m sitting by a little pavilion on the island’s east coast to watch the sunrise. There are clouds over the horizon, but a golden glow is flaming between them. A dozen or so other people have shown up in the last twenty minutes to this site advertised as the best spot for watching the sunrise, but I was here first.

My persnickety camera did manage to take this
sorta-decent sunrise picture before it decided not to
cooperate any longer.

The sun itself has finally shown its face between the strips of cloud. Everyone else is standing there taking pictures, but since my camera isn’t cooperating this morning, I’m limited to the pictures I can produce with words. (Thank goodness I bought this notebook yesterday!) The sun is spilling golden light over the lower layer of cloud, turning its overly-hardboiled-egg-yolk-gray (wouldn’t that be a great name for a crayon color?!) to a translucent pearly gleam. I can just make out the mountains of Taiwan below it, only their crisp upper edge visible through the cloud. The blue-gray ocean below glitters silver-yellow in wriggling wrinkles as diagonal shafts of sunlight stretch down toward it. 

The rhythmic pulse of the surf and the twitter and squawk of birds mostly cover the voices of the tourists not far away and the ticking of the newest-arrived scooter that a couple parked right by my bench. Now that the sun has fully ascended, most of the others have left. But this pair, munching their breakfast on the next bench, apparently didn’t look up the time of the sunrise last night.

Speaking of last night, Janice and Kenny and I went out to dinner at a restaurant advertising mahi-mahi cheeseburgers. I’m not usually a big burger fan, but it was good! Afterward, we stopped at a tea shop, and I tried a “mango cheese tea”. It came in three layers, with fruit and crushed ice on the bottom, sweet milky juice in the middle, and a foamy, salty froth of some sort of whipped cream cheese mixture on the top. It was strange but delicious, with the best results (in my opinion) coming when I mixed the top two layers.

We had signed up for a night-time scooter tour, so at 7:15, our hostess at our bed and breakfast took us to a place in town where a big group of people on scooters were waiting to meet the tour guide. He led us all first to a place where we all dismounted and looked at a tree with big, beautiful blossoms that apparently only bloom at night and for four hours at a time. He said a lot about these flowers in Chinese while we took pictures, and then we all got back on our scooters to go to the next tour stop.

Aren’t all these flowers pretty?
Actually, they’re all the same flower,
seen in our tour guide’s different flashlight settings.
The top one is its original color.

 
Unfortunately, I had trouble getting my scooter started. Janice and Kenny were nice enough to wait for me, and by the time I realized to my embarrassment that I simply hadn’t turned the key far enough in the dark, the rest of the group had gone. We took off after them as fast as we could, but when we came to a fork in the road, we had no way to tell which direction they’d taken. We picked one at random and hoped we’d catch up, but sadly, we never did. So the three of us ended up doing our own night-time scooter tour in the form of another circuit of the island (always fun) before returning to our B&B for the night.

As we got back, Kenny joked about getting up early to watch the sunrise, which inspired me. So here I am, still sitting by the coast, squinting while the now fully risen sun peers down intently to see what I’m writing about it.

Now I’m off to take the coastal road around the island again. I should just have time to make it back before our breakfast arrives at the B&B.

My writing spot in the Wild Boar Trench.

It’s almost 9:30 a.m., and I’m sitting on a bench partway along the Wild Boar Ecological Trail in the Wild Boar Trench (“ravine” would be a more accurate word). It’s the only one of Xiao Liu Qiu’s three main scenic spots that I didn’t get to yesterday. For some reason, I couldn’t find it, although I realize now that I drove right by the trailhead at least twice.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to announce that a family of Taiwanese tourists just walked past me, the oldest son carrying their pet bird on a leash. Might as well bring the whole household when you go on vacation, right?!

Anyway, I feel as though I’m barely in Taiwan anymore. There’s actually an option to step off the walkways with their pavement and handrails and onto – gasp! – DIRT trails!! Craggy cliffs loom all around, plastered with climbing plants. Spindly trees perch precariously at the top, their snake-like roots weaving their way clear to the bottom, clinging to the vertical rock face. Some don’t even try to find a footing in the rock, but stretch through the air and plunge directly into the soil like freestanding pillars. Vines of several varieties twist their way down the cliff, decorating its surface like intertwining ribbons. Some dangle in midair like tangles of braided rope. Coral boulders lie tumbled here and there, surfaces dusted with bits of dead leaves, live vegetation peeking out their pores, hinting at long-ago earthquakes and landslides. (How did chunks of coral get hundreds of meters from the beach and dozens of meters above sea level, anyway?)

Some trees straddle the ravine, trunks and roots and stiff projecting vines splayed across the open space, clutching the rock on either side. Stringly vines dangle like lifelines, swaying in the faint breeze.

Shards of sunlit sky are visible between the tangle of trinks and branches and leaves directly overhead, but it’s fairly dim here on the floor of the ravine. Insects peep and rattle around me, leaves rustle, and birds shrill from above. But it’s peaceful here, though more humid than the surrounding rea. I feels as though I’m sitting in another world.

For now, I’m going to leave this one to the mosquitoes who are trying so valiantly to defend it, and move on.

I didn’t see any wild boar (or any indication that they actually
live on Xiao Liu Qiu), but there were a lot of these little
cave mouths that probably lead to ideal homes for them.

10:40 a.m. I’m back in the B&B, waiting for the others to be ready to check out.

There are definitely more people visiting Xiao Liu Qiu today. (The island’s name gets easier to write every time – just in time for us to leave. 🙁 ) Many of the roads are narrow, obviously designed only for 2-way scooter traffic. But you round a bend and suddenly a colorful, hulking bus is trundling toward you, stopping at every scenic spot to disgorge throngs of distracted tourists who stand around in the street as though it was made for that purpose. Or you see herds of matching scooters go zooming down the little highways, most with passengers calling to each other or pointing at things or holding Go-Pros. With tomorrow being a holiday (Ten Ten), I’m glad we’re leaving today. It will only get more crowded.

Written from home later:

The line outside the restaurant after we left.

We fought with the crowds for the next few hours before our boat left. Janice, Kenny, and I decided to go out for an early lunch before the restaurants filled up, so we found a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that someone had recommended. We got the last empty table and enjoyed our lunch there, but as we were leaving, we saw that the line to get in now stretched out of the door and down the street! 

Janice, Kenny, and me with our bings.

We wanted to get bings (tasty frozen desserts – Xiao Liu Qiu has a LOT of places that sell them) from another little restaurant that someone else recommended. Once again, we got the last available table. We ordered a mango bing and a caramel-cashew bing to share. (Both were delicious, though I liked the caramel-cashew one better.) Once again, there was a line out the door by the time we left. It seems the tourists were following us!

Yum, yum!

Behind the bing restaurant, we took a nature walk through a bamboo garden that had ponds full of turtles and fish (and a particularly pretty butterfly). Then it was time to catch our boat back to Taiwan. (It sounds odd to say that, since Xiao Liu Qiu does belong to Taiwan … but I can’t say “back to the mainland” either, since Taiwan is also an island, and the mainland is China.) 

A butterfly (or moth?) in the bamboo garden

This time I stood outside for the 20-minute voyage. The sea wasn’t too rough, and it was windy and a really fun ride. Then we got on a shared taxi-van like the one we’d come out there on, followed by a train to Taichung, after which I took a taxi back to home sweet home. It was a great trip! I hope to go back to Xiao Liu Qiu again sometime with Floyd.

I’m sitting here in a scenic spot overlooking the ocean in Xiao Liu Qiu (pronounced “shauw lee oh cho”), a small island off the coast of Taiwan. It’s mid-afternoon and I’ve been having a lovely day driving around the island alone on my rented scooter.

A-Road B&B: the office is to the left,
rooms in the building to the right
(there are more behind it)

We left Taichung early yesterday morning: me, my coworker Janice, and her husband Kenny. We took the train to Kaohsiung, a 3-hour ride, then rode in a shared taxi-van for another 50 minutes to the harbor, then took a ferry across to Xiao Liu Qiu (about a 20-minute ride).

my room at A-Road

We rented scooters and found the place we’d arranged to stay, called A-Road Bed and Breakfast. Turns out it isn’t even officially open for business yet, but somehow we’d been able to get a reservation. I love my little room there — as far as I can remember, though I’ve been blessed with opportunities to travel a lot, this may be the first time I’ve ever had a hotel room all to myself anywhere. It has two beds with duvets, a place to hang up clothes, its own little bathroom, and the all-important air conditioning. And a TV that I have no intention of using. The door opens to the outside, and there are two little translucent windows that there’s no point in opening unless you want a view of a wall about eight inches away, or a water tank. The complimentary packets of drip coffee that awaited me on the mini-fridge when I arrived are labeled “Coffee n Fins”, which is the name of the coffee shop right next door. I especially appreciated that there were not only two little bottles of water for me, but a special faucet in the room for drinking water. (I’ve already used it to refill those two bottles plus my original one multiple times.)

After dropping our luggage off in our rooms, Janice, Kenny, and I went out walking to find lunch. It was fun to explore the neighborhood a little. The nearest major cross street is called Zhong Shan Road, because of course it is. (Anyone who’s traveled around Taiwan much will get that.) A-Road B&B isn’t located in one of the main touristy areas, so there aren’t a lot of dining choices right around it, but we eventually found a little restaurant not far away. I ordered curry chicken on rice, which was delicious and not spicy at all.

following the rest of the tour group

We had signed up for a tour of the “intertidal zone”, so we hurried back to A-Road to meet the representative who would lead us to where the tour guide was waiting. Since we were planning to go swimming after that, we put on swimsuits under our clothes and brought our snorkel gear.

sea cucumber

We joined a group of a couple dozen Taiwanese tourists down at the beach. The tour guide, who spoke only Chinese, led us around in the shallow water and picked up various sea creatures to tell us about. I was thankful to be wearing water shoes as they had recommended ahead of time but wished my shorts were shorter, since they were soon drenched. 

starfish
It was fun getting to see and hold sea cucumbers (which feel pleasantly squishy and squirt water like a bath toy when you squeeze them right — no, I don’t think it harms them), as well as a starfish, something my family always called a spider starfish back in Kenya but the guide was adamant was not actually a starfish, and a couple other creatures whose English names I never did find out.
apparently not a starfish



Eventually, Janice and Kenny left to go snorkeling, but I stuck with the tour, since we had paid for it. I understood very little of what the guide said without Janice there to translate, but that didn’t bother me. I enjoyed being part of the group, even as they only foreigner there.

no idea what this guy is

Afterward, I found a place up the beach to stash my things between a couple of boats that didn’t look as though anyone would be needing them any time soon and went to try out the snorkel and mask I’d bought for this trip. In retrospect, it may not have been the wisest move to leave my wallet there containing my ID, credit cards, and all the cash I’d brought, but since this is Taiwan, I wasn’t too worried. I just wrapped everything in my towel, left it in the shadows, and waded out to look for some turtles.

I left my things between the colorful boats on the right.

Xiao Liu Qiu is famous for its sea turtles, and I did see quite a few. It was a beautiful experience, just floating face down, feeling myself gently rise and fall with each wave, swimming just a little as I let myself drift. All around, the water was filled with the gentle crackling sound that I remember from snorkeling in Indonesia and that I’ve always assumed comes from the coral itself, but it turns out it’s made by the tiny shrimp living inside it. The coral was interesting and pretty, though nothing compares to the gorgeous underwater fantasy kingdoms I’d snorkeled over in Indonesia (but what could possibly compare to that?!). Still, I enjoyed watching interesting varieties of fish and avoiding hundreds (maybe thousands) of bristling sea urchins, some of which were the largest I’ve ever seen, about the size of soccer balls.

And the sea turtles. Yes, I swam among sea turtles for the first time in my life. Sometimes they appeared seemingly out of nowhere, so close that I had to hurriedly back away, since there are laws about not getting within five meters of them. They were all sizes: some obviously youngsters, others almost as long from flipper to flipper as I am tall! I got to watch them grazing (is that the right word?) on the algae that cover the chunks of coral.

instructions at the BBQ restaurant

Eventually I returned to shore to find all my belongings waiting safely where I had left them. That evening, Janice and Kenny and I dined at an outdoor barbecue restaurant just down the street from our B&B, where it was all we could eat for 389 NT. We chose veggies, sweet potatoes, and various kinds of meat and seafood from the refrigerators that held the buffet items, and then grilled them at our own table. All the while, we were watched intently by several well-fed cats that wandered from table to table trying to convince people they were starving. It was a fun and delicious meal.

For the next morning, the proprietor of our B&B had given us pictures of four breakfast options to choose from, all of which she would pick up from local eateries. I can’t tell you what mine was, except that it involved a bowl of soft, starchy paste topped with ground pork and a few pieces of slightly-sweet Taiwanese sausage. (We had the option of soy milk, coffee, or milk tea along with breakfast, but I forewent them because I planned to try out Coffee n Fins later.) There was also a complimentary package of twisty fried snacks for each of us, and an extra drink that apparently is a local specialty. I’m not sure what the drink was called, but it was sweet and tasty and involved a syrupy base with grass jelly and some kind of little seeds (not basil seed or passion fruit) mixed in.

one of many little harbors in Xiao Liu Qiu

After breakfast, the other two went off to spend the day snorkeling in various places along the coast, but I wanted to see more of the island. I wasn’t sure if I’d end up wishing for company, but it has turned out to be a really fun day for me, even spent all on my own. I decided to do a circuit of the island, stopping to see the sights along the way, so my scooter and I set off along the coastal road. It was a lovely, quiet drive with almost no traffic except for the occasional scooter. And the views! It’s so pretty around here, with the ocean on one side and often hills or cliffs on the other, along a gently winding road that dips in and out of shade and sunshine, up and down gentle rises. I’ve been getting more confident in my driving, and it’s been really fun to just feel the wind in my face as I zip along. This little electric scooter can’t go terribly fast — my top speed down a hill was 44 KPH (about 27 MPH) — but everything feels faster and more exciting in the open air!

Beauty Cave had lots of warnings like this

My first stop was the “Beauty Cave”, which wasn’t really very beautiful, but involved a pleasant stroll in and out of a series of small caves, under overhangs, and along the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. 

looking out of the Beauty Cave
To get in, I had to buy a ticket for 120 NT (about US$4), which I might have considered more than it was worth except that the same ticket can be used at three different scenic places around the island (as long as you go to all of them on the same day).


me with my popsicle

My next stop was the Black Devil Cave, also called the Black Dwarf Cave or Black Spirit Cave. I bought a Buddha-fruit popsicle from a stand near the entrance and spent a few minutes enjoying my snack along with the company of my trusty Kindle at a little table. 

some of the interesting sculptures

Then I looked through a nearby gallery of interesting wooden sculptures before exploring the cave itself. 

I assumed this was true at the time …

I was intrigued to learn the history of this cave, which you can read about on this sign. (Note from later: I looked it up when I got home, and it turns out that story is entirely fabricated! You can read the real history of the Black Devil Cave here.) 

an ocean view from the Black Devil Cave

Once again, the “cave” involved a hiking trail (read: paved walkway with stairs) through and near a series of small caves and overhangs, with plenty of gorgeous ocean views. Several times, I stopped to just watch the waves and talk to God for a while.

Back on the scooter, I succeeded in changing the battery when the original one finally ran out of juice, a task I had been a little nervous about, but which went fine. But I was thankful for the helpful stranger who showed me how to open the seat compartment where the battery lives when I couldn’t remember how. (No, I don’t ride scooters very often. Why do you ask?)
Coffee n Fins

Eventually, I ended up back at A-Road, where I stopped in my room to replenish my drinking water supply, and then stepped next door to try out Coffee n Fins, which hadn’t been open earlier. It turned out to be a tiny coffee shop less than half the size of my kitchen back home, with a little family-style table in the middle. I saw that others had taken off their shoes at the door, so I did the same. Inside, the proprietor sat eating a bowl of noodles, making conversation with his colleague and two customers who were drinking coffee. Since there was no English menu, I was thankful that the boss spoke English. He offered me various types of coffee from around the world and let me smell the beans. I didn’t tell him I’m not enough of a coffee connoisseur to detect any difference between them! Though they didn’t specialize in fancy ways to prepare coffee, I asked for and received a good iced latte (with one big spherical ice “cube”) that hit the spot on this warm day. When I inquired about sugar, he looked dubious and dug through a cupboard but eventually found some for me. He talked me into staying to drink my latte there instead of taking it to go, as I’d originally requested. His air conditioning argument won me over, along with the fact that I had no other good place nearby to drink it, unless I wanted to sit in my room, which I didn’t. We all made conversation over our coffee or noodles (the others spoke varying amounts of English), and I found out that the two guys who work there also give scuba diving lessons/tours. That explains the name of their business.

Latte downed, I drove off to look for somewhere to get lunch. I explored the main town and tried out some sidestreets before I eventually found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant with exactly what I’d been hoping for: an English menu. I ordered a bowl of “mixed noodle soup” that contained clams, fish balls, ground pork, and green leafy veggies. Once again, I spent some quality time with my Kindle as I enjoyed the tasty meal.

As I drove around the town and waterfront afterward, stopping to take pictures here and there, I found myself wishing I could write about my day. I had purposely chosen not to bring my laptop on this trip, but the writer in me is embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even bring pen and paper! I knew I could always blog about it after I got back home, but the details wouldn’t be fresh in my mind by then, and the words wanted out in the meantime.

the place where what you’ve just read got written

Finding a stationery store, I went in and purchased a thin notebook and two pens. Then I rode around a little longer, back on the coastal road, sure I would find just the right place to stop and write. I ended up taking a narrow turn-off that led me to a scenic spot where there happens to be a little glass-topped table and a couple of fairly comfortable chairs. It’s the perfect place! I’ve been sitting here for almost two hours now, listening to the surf and recording my simple adventures so far. 

writing in my little notebook

My heart is full of gratitude for so many little blessings sprinkled through this lovely day. I have really enjoyed the solitude, and I feel as though my soul has been fed, though I hadn’t realized it was hungry. I’ve loved the natural beauty all around and the chance to explore where I wanted, how I wanted, staying in each spot exactly as long as I wanted. It will be nice to meet my friends again for dinner, but I wouldn’t trade this day of beautiful solitude for anything. And I’m thankful for the opportunity to paint it with words on paper, to (probably) be transferred to my blog later. 

(Note from later: obviously the transferring did happen. 🙂 )

I’ll sign off now and write some more tomorrow. Time to go rejoin the others and figure out where to eat.

(To read part II of my Xiao Liu Qiu adventures, click here.)

Well, Floyd and I just enjoyed three days’ vacation on Green Island in a hotel we were not planning on staying at.
We got lost a couple of times getting from Kaohsiung (southern Taiwan) to the harbor in Taitung (eastern Taiwan), but that’s another story.  Finally we found the right place to catch the boat to Green Island, and we managed to buy our round-trip tickets with no problem.




The 50-minute boat ride was really fun for me – lots of big billows, and my stomach quite frequently did that going-down-a-drop-on-a-roller-coaster plunge.  Wheee!  Floyd didn’t find it quite as fun as I did, but he had Dramamine, and he and his stomach somehow hung in there.
Well, we disembarked on Green Island with our duffel bag, two backpacks, the laptop in its case, my purse, Floyd’s satchel, a second duffel bag with two foam pads in case the hotel mattress was hard (as many of them tend to be here), and the address of our hotel written in Chinese.  (We didn’t know the name of the hotel in either language.)  I should mention here that a friend had recommended the hotel to us as one that she had stayed in, and she’d emailed us its Chinese address and the phone number.  A different friend had helped us call the number and make a reservation (in Chinese) for the two nights we planned to stay.
So we lugged all our luggage (I guess that’s why they call it that, huh?) away from the busy port area to a quieter street to figure out what to do next and where to go.  Several enthusiastic locals came over to see if we wanted help (I assume they work for tour companies or hotels and were trying to get our business, though we couldn’t understand them).  One little old lady on a scooter was very persistent, so finally we showed her the hotel address to see if she could help us get there (and to show her that we didn’t need her help figuring out where to stay on the island).  She read the characters and looked perplexed, and I understood her when she pointed at the first two characters and told us the address was in Taitung.  Actually, I could read those particular characters too, though it hadn’t occurred to me to look closely or think about them before.  Wait – could our reservation actually be for a hotel back in Taitung and not on Green Island?  Surely not!
We didn’t have the phone numbers of either of our helpful friends, but we did have our other friend Clive’s number.  Floyd called him and explained the situation – and long story short, after about ten minutes and several separate calls and the little old lady hanging around and trying to talk to us and ask us what was going on, we determined that our reservation was indeed in Taitung.  Oh no!  Here we were in Green Island with tickets to return the day after tomorrow, and no hotel reservation.  Thankfully we hadn’t actually paid in advance for our other hotel! 


Well, Clive is bilingual, so we passed the phone to our kind old lady, and the two of them had quite a conversation.  A couple of times she passed it back to Floyd so Clive could update him what they’d been saying, and then it went back to the lady again.  (But we still didn’t really have a very clear picture of what they were figuring out for us.)  Finally the lady hung up, passed the phone back to Floyd, and gestured for me to get on the back of her scooter.  What else could I do?  I grabbed my purse and the laptop case, waved goodbye to Floyd, and got on behind her.



We drove a little way down the street and stopped where – thank goodness – another lady was waiting who spoke some English.  (I should mention that the little old lady had made a few phone calls on her own phone a little earlier too.)  The new lady asked me if my husband and I wanted to rent a scooter for one, two, or three days; and I told her I wasn’t sure we wanted to rent one at all.  Maybe a bike?  She spoke to someone who might have been her daughter, who disappeared down the street and came back riding a bike.  They insisted I try it out, and I mentioned we had heard there were electric bikes for rent here.  Back went the daughter and brought me an electric bike to test ride.  They wanted an answer right then, but Floyd and I hadn’t really decided anything, and I didn’t want to sign anything without him there, and where was he anyway?
About that time some man drove up on a scooter with Floyd riding on the back.  Most of our luggage was nowhere in sight.  After a quick discussion and two test rides, we decided to rent a scooter.  Neither of us has a scooter license, and I don’t even have a Taiwan driver’s license, but they assured us that was no problem and we could both legally drive this 50 cc one and be covered by their insurance in case of accident.  I had never actually driven a scooter before, but the lady gave me a quick lesson then and there and I discovered it wasn’t too hard.  We had to pay in advance and leave Floyd’s license with her, which we’re still a little nervous about, but she seemed very friendly ….

 So Floyd got on the scooter, I hopped on behind him (still clutching the purse and laptop), and our little old lady friend got on her own scooter and gestured for us to follow.  We had no idea where we were going, but she led the way back toward the dock, where we found the rest of our luggage sitting quietly off to one side, waiting for us unattended.  A man who had come with us on a third scooter picked up the pieces we weren’t already carrying and somehow balanced them on his scooter (the little old lady helped). 
On we drove, and eventually ended up at a humble little hotel.  It was run by the same company (Chung Hwa Telecom – the phone company) as the one we were supposed to stay in, so maybe they were able to somehow transfer our reservation.
Our little old lady friend waved goodbye and drove away before we could think of some culturally appropriate way to express our deep gratitude for her help.  I shudder to think how we would have coped with the situation without such a Good Samaritan there to assist!  All I can say is, I hope she got paid some sort of commission from the hotel or the scooter company, because she didn’t ask for or seem to expect anything from us.
Well, the hotel lady welcomed us in and helped us get our luggage to our room, and we proceeded to have an interesting conversation with the help of her iPhone.  She gave us a brochure with a map of the island and touristy spots labeled in both English and Chinese, and  recommended certain sites and answered our questions.  But she spoke almost no English, and our Chinese certainly doesn’t take us very far.  So she would type something into her phone, pull up the English translation, and let us read it on the screen.  It worked!





Anyway, we were glad to be able to relax in our room and sort through and unpack our luggage.  From the first moment I sat down on the bed, I could tell we would most definitely be thankful for those foam pads (and sure enough, we were)!








  But “thankful” really is the theme of  the afternoon.  We’re thankful there was good phone reception here, thankful we could get ahold of Clive, thankful he was willing to help us, thankful for the little old Taiwanese lady who may just have been an angel in disguise, thankful that it worked out to rent a scooter that we can both legally drive, thankful we didn’t lose any money with the hotel problem, thankful all our luggage rejoined us intact, thankful there was a room available here for us for two nights at a very reasonable rate, and thankful for the technology that helped us work everything out!  Thank you, Lord!


Tomorrow we hope to drive our rented scooter around the island, following the map we were given, and stop to see and do various things along the way.  Stay tuned for another update – but hopefully this one will be much tamer!


Floyd and I celebrated Valentine’s Day at a very unusual restaurant here in Taichung, Taiwan.  


It’s called The Modern Toilet, and the decor and some of the food are bathroom-themed.


This is what greeted us when we walked in.  Only in Taiwan!

The container by the front counter where the chopsticks are kept:

The glass tabletops were supported from underneath by these washbasins.

This was the table across from ours.  For some reason, our seats were regular chairs instead of the padded toilet lids that they got.

The booths came with these comfortable seat cushions.

Note the washbasin sticking out from the flower design on the wall.  And do you see the shape of the light fixtures?

Some menu items were relatively “normal”.  Others called attention to themselves by their shape or the dish they were served in.

I ended up ordering the toilet curry chicken mentioned below.  I just couldn’t see myself going to a restaurant like this and not ordering something in a toilet-shaped dish!

Here it is: my dinner!  And yes, it was delicious.
 Who wants dessert?  This is what they serve their ice cream in.
Extra seating near the exit:
What a fun experience!  I’m not sure I’d go back, but it was definitely worth it to go once.  You can’t live in Taiwan and not try things like this!