One Day in Taipei

We've arrived in Taipei, if you couldn't tell from my last post and the picture above. My father-in-law's good friend, Mr. Wu, met us at the airport with his family: wife and youngest daughter. They were incredibly friendly and talked for the whole hour-long trip from the airport, sometimes all at once and usually two at a time. Jiyeoun commented later what a huge difference it made to have someone, even just acquaintances, meet us. It made the endeavor much less lonely. And, they seemed like such good contacts. Just in the drive back from the airport they offered to take us to a hot spring, teach me golf, go hiking, and invited us to live with them. They saw us to the hotel and Mrs. Wu fought with the clerk to get us an extra discount on top of the 10% discount Jiyeoun already got. Today Mr. Wu is going to meet us at 10:30 a.m. and take us around to look at apartments. He's already been doing research and talking to realtors. Amazing.



Jiyeoun is doing an amazing job herself. The place she found for us is called the Ferrary Hotel. The pictures above were taken from the window of your room. It's right down town, a 10 minute walk from the metro, clean, has in-room wireless Internet, and includes free breakfast all for about $50US. Mr. and Mrs. Wu were amazed at the deal. As their daughter said, "I didn't think you could get a place down town for less than $100 dollars and it's not small." I guess she expected a dumpy, hole-in-the-wall for the price we were paying. So, there it is, Jiyeoun did a better job than the locals thought they could. All thanks to her diligence and the Internet. I don't know how people moved to other countries before the Internet was invented. It must have been like shooting in the dark.