First Days in Taiwan

This web page idea is Anne Nester-Hamblen's! let's see how we (and you all) like it! As most of you know, we have been here now for three full days! The land is beautiful, tropical, lush and very hot and humid! We have to climb four sets of very steep steps to get basically anywhere from our villa apt, which has three bedrooms, nice size living room, two full baths, and a small galley kitchen (no stove or oven; cooking meals is definitely a challenge! I have succeeded in our first dinner here: a single frying pan on a hot plate held our asparagus, a salmon steak, and some pork and corn dumplings!) Since being here, we have: gotten cell phones and even, finally, gotten the cell phone menu to come up in English rather than Chinese!!), found an ATM machine that would accept our type of bank card (rejected at the first three we tried and we had NO NRT (Taiwanese dollars ) at that point!), been taken by taxi with our host's assistant ,Janet, to a grocery store (we are not near much in the way of retail stores, except for a 7-11, but even to get to that, we have to navigate those steps!I hope to lose lots of weight while here! I certainly will become more fit!), gone by ourselves via a short ferry ride to a nearby island for a hike on a beach and some seafood lunch at a street cafe (all in Chinese!), gone to the nighttime Lantern Festival, toured a famous monastery (Fo Guang Shan) out in the countryside and "made" our own tea in a sub-culture community , a Haku village!