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Thursday, September 16, 2010

Welcome to NashWill: My Review of Taitung

Okay, so I know that you all are coming here to see Nash and Will and Reed. I know that. I understand that my cleverness and thoughtful play-by-play pale in comparison to those cute pictures of the boys. So, I've decided to put a video on this post from yesterday. I've got to scramble to get another post ready in a couple of hours with pictures. We've not done much exciting today, and now the boys are napping, so unless you want me to take pictures of my soon-to-be trip to the laundromat, I really need to snap some pictures.


Busy Day from Jeff Land on Vimeo.



I also realize that some people who read this blog might be traveling to Taiwan to pick up their babies soon, so I wanted to record my thoughts about Taitung first and will follow-up with Taipei later.

1. The Taitung airport is a breeze. It is not large, easy to navigate and Deana parked her van right in front of the door, locked it and came in with us. That's just a little bit about security.

2. Taitung is far less populated and far less westernized than Taipei. They don't have the common shops that we see in America like Taipei does.

3. Deana's mom has a problem with unique smells. Taitung does have a scent. It's not a bad scent, it's just not your everyday, smoggy city smell like you find in most of your big American cities and Taipei. It's probably the smell of fresh air, we're just not sure what that smells like anymore. Although, if you are a non-adventurous eater, like myself, the smells around eating establishments are more pronounced. Again, not bad, just different.

4. There are some American places to eat like McDonald's (that still has fried apple pies from before the American McDonald's decided they were unhealthy for us. I love those things!) and KFC (which has only spicy crispy, but is good), and Pizza Hut (which has a bit of an Asian flare.).

5. Our hotel, The Hotel Kindness, was wonderful. The rooms were large and we had two queen sized beds. They were a bit unique in that part of the room had a a more European feel with the mattress being on the ground and more contemporary furnishing, then the other part of the room had another bed with a very traditional Victorian headboard. They kept the rooms SUPERBLY clean, had English Channels on the TV, a refrigerator, and internet connection with Ethernet cable. The internet was a little slow, but nothing terrible.

6. The hotel also had a Chinese Breakfast every morning, and midnight snack every night. We didn't go to the midnight snack, but I think it was noodles of some sort. The breakfast was good, but it only had pineapple (which is delicious in Taiwan) once! They had a nice bread selection for toast, rice, cereal, milk, OJ, and several different Chinese foods of which I don't know the names of.

7. The hotel also had unlimited ICE CREAM which you scooped for yourself from 8 flavors. ICE CREAM is one of my love languages, so this was a definite plus for me.

8. Free laundry facilities are in the hotel, so if you are like Abbey and me and don't have 2 weeks worth of clothes, you will probably enjoy this feature. They even provide laundry soap.

9. I would stay in the Kindness again if I go back to Taitung. It was the midrange hotel, not too expensive and not too standard. There is another one, Naruwan than some people stay in, but from the prices I found on the internet, it looked to be $200 per night USD. I don't care where I'm sleeping, there's not a room that's worth that much money in my opinion.

10. We were so busy while we were in Taitung that we didn't get to do much sightseeing, but there is a beach that's not too far away.

All in all, I really enjoyed our time in Taitung. I probably would have enjoyed it more and stayed longer if we could have brought Lola, Uncle Bill, and most importantly Reed. However, I think that it was very important that for the first couple of days, it was just me, Abbey, Nash, and Will. That was good bonding time and starting to figure each other out time.

It's almost time for Uncle Bill to head to the airport, then our ratio of adults to children will be 3:3. Pray for us. We'll probably all cry when he leaves.

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