Taiwan

I'm in the Taiwan airport right now waiting to go back to Shanghai.  I love coming to Taiwan.  It feels like a second home to me.  Even though my time in the mainland has now far surpassed the time that I spent in Taiwan this place will always remain special to me.  This trip was to meet with a new distributor that we've been working with for about 5 months now.  We decided to be one of the sponsors of the Taiwan 70.3 Ironman race in Southern Taiwan.  It was fun to go work at a race, a race that I was supposed to do but with leg problems haven't been able to prepare for.  Three of my friends from Shanghai came to the race.  They were from Utah, Australia, and Sweden.  They all did very well.  The two-time Ironman world champion was also there for the race.  He won of course but my Sweedish came him a good race finishing in 3rd place in the professional race.

I've also made sure to eat some of my favorite foods while here.  My customer is always getting a kick out of the fact that I never want to go to the nice restaurants but always want to go to the cheap hole in the wall joints.  This is what I ate when I was here on my mission and it became my favorite food.  So we will go out with a group of 4 of us and the total bill is like $15 and the food is awesome.  I had my favorite breakfast this morning at a little shop and my friends and customer alike were loving it.  $10 for all four of us to eat ourselves silly!  I also stopped at a grocery store to pick up my favorite peanut butter that you can only get in Taiwan.  I bought 4 big cans of it as well as 6 bricks of this drink called Dong Gua Cha.  You can buy the brick and boil it down, add water and you've got yourself an awesome drink.  My 6 bricks should make about 30 gallons worth.  My suitcase is now quite heavy.

I feel quite lucky to be able to come back to Taiwan every now and then.  Not everyone gets to go back to where they served their mission.  It is fun to come back and enjoy the people, culture, food, language etc - yes, the language here is quite different from Shanghai.  The easiest way to describe the difference in language would be like comparing English from LA to London, same language but quite different.  With my new customer here I'll be here more often too.