The end...

   Well, I've arrived back home and in retrospect, I have to say, this vacation has been bittersweet, full of up and downs, and not at all what I had expected (in both good and bad ways).
   Aside from having fun, this trip was really meant to visit family (since I haven't been back to Taiwan for 6-7 years). During that time, a lot has happened, the details of which I'm not going to get into. I can't tell you how shocking it was to have to overlap the memory of my once vibrant grandmother with that of an ailing woman on an hospice bed. During my time in Taiwan, she caught pneumonia and things were a little touch-and-go for a while but luckily she stabilized just before my departure.
   While seeing family members was really great, it also meant I didn't have any personal time to just explore by myself and I only hit about three-quarters of the places on my list. I guess I'll just have to go back to Taiwan again... :)

   All that being said, I also went to a lot of wonderful places that wasn't on my original list thanks to my third uncle (whom in my opinion, can be a professional guide). Over the next week or so, as I unpack and adjust to the 13-hour time difference, I'll be organizing my pictures and updating the blog so stay tuned.

Karma

Well, karma is a real witch with a capital b sometimes. With less than five days left in my vacation, I’m running a small fever and expelled from my own home (we found out that some major repairs had to be done). I’m sitting at a McDonald’s, internet-less (this post was typed out on Word), the construction outside compounding my headache. I suppose it’s the cosmic universe’s way of punishing me for having too much fun. Even the hash brown brings a new wave of nausea.

I really just want to lie down on a comfortable bed and pass out at this point, but as they say in theatre, “the show must go on!”

I was fortunate enough to attend the “trial run” of the Taipei Floral Expo. Thank you big uncle and your connections! It was pretty amazing. Of course, the amazingness of the expo meant huge line-ups everywhere. There were several pavilions, each with a different theme. I went to “the ark,” the wall of which was made up entirely of recycled plastic. The recycled bottles snap together like LEGO and refract light in a way that softens and amplifies. Pretty neat.

I also went to:

-The pavilion of dreams: the pavilion with the biggest line-up. You had to line up just to get your time ticket. I think I lined up around 9:25am and ended up getting a time ticket for 1:40pm. By 10 am, all the time tickets for the day were gone. This pavilion was about the merge between technology and nature. The pavilion is very interactive. You step in a circle and as you breathe in and out, a tiny sapling grows into a giant tree. And there’s also a 360-degree screen that showed amazing views of mountains, marshlands, clouds, etc… I’m sure my description is not doing the pavilion justice. 

That's all for now. Heading home to see if I can lie down for a little bit.