Kaohsiung Skyline

Some new buildings went up since the last time we were in Kaohsiung. They are on the right side of the photo.

Love River

I wanted to take some photos of the lights at Love River. We finally got there Friday evening, the day before I was to leave Taiwan. There was a lantern contest. We walked through the tents of lanterns and then waited for the good evening light to arrive.

I met up with HL, Dad and Joy after I had taken some shots of the river and the lights. As we were walking back to the road to catch a taxi we heard fireworks! We had no idea that was coming. I rushed up the path so I could get a good spot on the bridge. We think it was a test because no one seemed to know it was going to happen.

A few days later HL went back to the same spot. She said it was crammed with people.

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Huge thanks!

Thank you Rich for taking care of Crummy and our house while we were gone. You did it all, even though I gave you the wrong key. Cool!

More Photos on Flickr

Here's the address:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wofungla/sets/72157603511916872/

We're Back

The rest of our trip was uneventful. It's nice to be back in Lititz. I miss HL and Joy.

I had planned to post lots of photos to my flickr account. I didn't get many good shots. It was almost always hazy, and the sky turned out totally white in a lot of my shots.

Hui-Jen has a nice internet connection, but it was too slow to upload photos. If I post more, I'll mention it here.

Thanks for reading!

It's an adventure, uh, yeah, that's it...

Dad and I left Taiwan around 8:20 am on Saturday. When we checked in we noticed that our flight went to Dallas instead of Chicago. When we got to Japan we had to check in again to get our remaining boarding passes. I asked why it said Dallas and was told "sit over there and wait, it may take some time to figure this out". It didn't take too long. Our Chicago flight had been cancelled.



So we flew from Japan to Dallas/Fort Worth. The flight had a few rough spots, but nothing really bad. Near the end of the flight the captain came on the PA and told us he would like to say we are about 30 minutes away from Dallas. But he couldn't. He had just made a 90 degree turn to avoid a storm. He said we might have to circle for a while. If we stayed up too long, we would need to refuel in San Antonio. We circled for about 1 hour before landing. That was rough! As we touched down we shook back and forth a little. I thought we were going to tip over!



Once we got inside we had to wait in an enormous line for immigration. Luckily this line moved quickly, but we got pulled aside by customs for a check. They x-rayed all of our luggage and hand checked one of them. We now had about 15 minutes to re-check our luggage, find our gate and board. That's when we found out that our flight to Baltimore had been cancelled too! We were told we had 3 choices. Try to get on the next flight to Baltimore via standby, try a Washington airport, or try again tomorrow. Whatever we choose, our luggage was going to Baltimore on the next flight. I wanted to be on the same flight to the same ariport as our luggage, so we opted for staying the night and flying Sunday morning. After we waited in line for a few minutes an airport worker told us to go upstairs and get in another line at another gate. This ended up being a shorter line of people, but it was moving at a snails pace. We eventually got booked on an early flight and got a distressed traveller rate on a hotel. AA made the reservation for us.


After we dropped our stuff at the hotel (via the hotel shuttle) we walked to a nearby steak joint. What a great steak! We also had a spinach/crab/cheese dip.


We're going to call it an early night. Our shuttle leaves at 4:30 am.


Tomorrow is going to be a great travellinng day.

Acrobats

Last night we saw some amazing Chinese Acrobats from Sichuan. The show was at the temple we visited a few nights ago.

HL, Dad and Joy got nice large plastic chairs with back and arms and were allowed to sit in a special area up front. It was reserved for older people and people with small children.I could have sat there too but I wanted to make sure there were not too many people in front of me. I took a hard metal stool and sat off to one side, one person behind the edge of the special section. After a while the people in front of me moved and I was able to move to the front row. The special section never filled up so I had a clear view of the stage.

The famous mask changers were there. The colored masks would change when their faces were covered. It happened in about a second.