The Winning Ticket 勝利的滋味

Hsu (left) and Cole wave to the assembled throng after their
landslide election as president.

DATELINE: 9 JANUARY, 2012 TAIPEI, TAIWAN
Despite having been in the country less than four months, Mark Ivan Cole and Yet-Ping "Ping" Hsu have been elected to Taiwan's highest office.

Happy New Year from Taiwan! 從台灣祝您新年快樂

WOW! 2012 is here! It's been a momentous and eventful 2011 for us, and we're looking ahead to what 2012 will bring. But first...here's the last bit from 2011: our New Year's Eve day.

Since this is Taiwan, of course, it all starts with food! However, we're pretty sure this is the ONLY place in the world where you'll get good food at a place called "Modern Toilet." Yes, that's what the sign says on the wall, and that's the name of the restaurant. When you walk up the stairs, you hear a doorbell ring and someone yells "Welcome Toilet!" from the top of the stairs.

Your eyes do not deceive you...

Christmas in Beitou 北投的聖誕節

We've just had our first Christmas in the house in Beitou 北投. Wow. It couldn't have been more different from every other Christmas we've ever had!

5:30 AM. The alarm goes off. Get up, get dressed, meet Santa Claus... no, wait. Check that. Actually, we went down to the pick-up point a few blocks away to join Baba and Mama to go to the memorial.

A Couple of Hours of Daylight 還有一點日光

It's so easy to put off self care in favor of busyness. There's always something more to do. You can write one more email or look up one more thing for that project. You can clean something...because something always needs cleaning! But we need more than just to get things done.

Today, we realized that this week's One Day Of Good Weather was getting away from us! Why? We'd been busy. Right.

Ping said: "We have only a couple of hours of daylight left, not really much time to do anything. Should we just go take a walk?" Yeah, let's go. We grabbed jackets and headed out the door. Ping laughed because, as usual, we had no idea where we were going.

Progressive Dinner, Beitou Market-Style 漸進式的晚餐

Since we've chosen not to buy (and store) an artificial tree, we decided the only way to hang ornaments was to string them up. Somewhere. Mark stretched some speaker wire between hooks that he screwed into a couple of the bits of wood in the house, but we still had to get something with which to hang the ornaments themselves. Yarn would be just the thing. Sure. In Beitou 北投? Hey, let's go take a look!

The Eye of the Beholder 仁者見仁

We walked home from grocery shopping at Carrefour 家樂福 tonight, heading back up the hill in the gathering dusk. Cool wind rushed down the street and tried to slip its fingers inside the jackets we never thought we'd wear in Taiwan台灣. Dark clouds scudded across the deepening gray sky and muted silver wisps of mist touched down and lifted back off of the heavily wooded mountains ahead of us. Ping and I both carried backpacks filled with yummy food, including our delicious biendang便當 for tonight's dinner. It was another good evening in a good life! We talked about how much we love all the different things we've been through: Christmas holidays in the Wallowa Mountains, trips to Lake Tahoe, and now our new home in Beitou北投.

It's all about appreciation. Whatever is right in front of us is what it is, of course, but how we approach it--how we see it--determines how we experience it.

Take the Long Way [From] Home

A few weeks ago, we started walking a lot longer, as we mentioned in other posts. It all started with Mark's Thanksgiving Day 10 km trek over the hill (hey, whaddya know: Mark is over the hill!) to go to Alice and YuChi's house in Zhuwei竹圍.

You never know what you'll run into. This is Mark's sketch of one of the spots on the route where he simply ran out of pavement and had to hope he could find the hidden path that threaded through the woods.