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Showing posts from August, 2023

Elevator conversation

In Taiwan: a nice older lady gets on the elevator. Conversation in Chinese (strangers often speak to each other in elevators there): Older Lady: Have you eaten yet?  Me: oh yes, I've eaten OL: Eat more fruits and vegetables Me: What about you, have you eaten yet? OL: I'm going to go buy bread

Preparing for international travel - it's been a while!

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I haven't flown anywhere in some time... almost exactly three years. I'm very much looking forward to traveling again and am planning to go to Taiwan in a couple of months! Especially because it's been a while, I've been doing what I can to be prepared. The first step (well, other than deciding where to go!) was to make sure that my passport was okay and not about to expire. Around this time, Taiwan hadn't re-opened to US citizens for tourism yet (due to COVID) so I decided to renew my Taiwanese passport just in case. It took a couple months for the new one to arrive since the application had to go from the embassy to Taiwan to be processed.  Note: by now, things are back to normal and US citizens are allowed to visit for tourism without a visa as long as the stay is less than 90 days. Second step was to buy the plane ticket and then book lodging. On a typical vacation, I'd probably look into what cities or other countries I'd like to visit and book lodging/