PEK to TPE

Hello from Taipei.

I have this random tradition of writing a post whenever I step outside the Great Firewall. I've been thinking about why that is, and I've mostly decided that it's to maintain the illusion that the reason I don't blog on here as much as I'd like is because I have to go through the trouble of posting from our VPN.

I spend about 90% of my online time on VPN while in Beijing, though, so that's not a real excuse, even if the Blogger dashboard is crazy slow when accessing from Beijing. Btw, I've been considering a jump to Tumblr or Wordpress if anyone has any thoughts on that.

Anyway, Marilyn and I zipped over to Taiwan for a week to spend some time with her parents. Oddly enough, it's Taiwan's "National Day" today (not sure how to word that without getting in trouble). We had several large tour groups from the mainland on our flight (one feisty tour member tried to cut in front of us at the check-in counter before being regulated on by her tour guide), and M's dad remarked that they were commemorating back-to-back national days, since China's is on Oct. 1.

Looking forward to a restorative week here. Us Beijingers have to get out of the city every once in a while to take a breath (of fresh air) and return, if only temporarily, to sanity.

The truckloads of ultra-fresh seafood that we'll be consuming this week should help with that...