Update

Excuse me if posts for the foreseeable future are choppy. My head is spinning and I'm not sure I can string two thoughts together!

Eric is supposed to go to Taiwan the 1st week of April - the same day his Mother and Aunt are arriving for a long-planned visit. Oh well... nothing we can do about it!

I am flying "home" to Boise next week for a quick visit with my parents. I haven't seen them in almost 2 years and since our plans change practically day by day I cannot be sure when I might get to visit them if I don't take the opportunity now. So I will fly out for a few days, then it goes like this: I come home, the next day Eric leaves in the morning and his Mom and Aunt arrive in the evening. I don't yet know when the kids and I will head to Taiwan. We have to get all of our paperwork in order first.

Eric's company agreed to put all of us in business class for our international flights. Woo hoo! WOO HOO! That makes me happier than I can possibly express in writing. WOOOO HOOOOO! I have never flown internationally before and am not relishing the idea of 17 hours on an airplane - let alone with kids! Thankfully the kids aren't super little anymore so they should be okay, and in business class the seats lay down flat so we should (hopefully) be able to get some sleep.

We are not clear yet on where we will be staying. We have some Internet links but are not 100% sure we are looking at the right place. I am hoping that one place I looked at is "the" place - the apartments look fabulous AND the building has a spa - - a real spa with facials and massages! Having recently had the first facial of my life and fallen in love with the experience, I'm thinking I could get real used to popping downstairs for a facial. I may never want to return to the states!

I visited with Gloria yesterday. To my immense relief she will be in Taiwan for 1 month of the time I am there. It will be SO COOL to have her as a tour guide! I told her I had read about fabric markets in Beijing and wondered if there was a similar thing in Taipei. There is, and she wrote it in Chinese for me so I can get in a cab and show it to the driver and they will know where to take me. (Very few people in Taiwan speak English. This is really going to be an experience!) She told me there is also a flower market which I MUST visit so she wrote that in Chinese too. I'm hoping it is near where we live so that we can have a constant supply of fresh flowers in our home. I found out Gloria has historically spent a great deal of her summer fishing. She and her husband will take our family fishing one day - that will be cool. There is a great deal of humor in her recounting of her fishing times, but I am no where near having enough time to try to write that now. Maybe another day.

I'll post more as I remember it!