Around The World In 72 Days - Arrival Of The Grandchildren

As mentioned in my trip concept explanation post one of the prime motivators of this trips design was to have time alone with two of our grandchildren, 2.2 & 2.3*. 

Because their Mom #2 is a diplomat of career, they have spent much of their time outside of the United States (Manila, Hong Kong, Kiev, Erbil [Iraq], and now Shanghai). As much as Wife and I have put in the time and effort to go visit them wherever they are, realistically it has been hard for us to truly be a part of the family's life. That was why our original idea in 2020 of getting time with them by ourselves was so important. Then Covid comes along, the disruption made many times worse for the #2's because of China's extended, draconian shutdown, and that idea gets blown out of the water.

Now the two are 18 and 17 respectively. 2.2 will be graduating high school this year and will heading to Spain for her university schooling. It was now or never.

*Note About Name Designations

As I gave the blog out to some new readers for this trip, I thought an explanation of name designations would be appropriate. When I started my blog in 2017, I didn't understand protocol and made the mistake of putting people's actual names in my posts. I was very quickly educated that was not proper and started to come up with various names for people. It started to get very complicated as I have three daughters, three son-in-laws, and eight grandchildren. For my own piece-of-mind and ease of remembering, I created an alpha numeric system to keep track of everyone. The primary offspring are daughters 1, 2, & 3 in age order. Their husbands are given a letter designation based on if it is a first, second, or third marriage. Thus 3A is daughter #3's first husband. 2B is daughter #2's second husband. We have no C's in the family at this time. The grandchildren are numeric in birth order. Thus 2.2 is the second child of daughter #2. 2.3 is the third child of daughter #2. Simple. N'est-ce pas!

Further Settling In 

With the grandchildren scheduled to arrive in the mid-afternoon, the first order of business was getting our Metro cards (the Easy Card) filled up, figuring out how to get to the airport, and in general figure out where the heck we were and how to get around. It is a cool feature of Taipei that their Metro cards don't expire so the ones we lovingly brought back in 2017 and kept in our safe were fully functional. Walking to the nearest Metro station allowed us to get our bearings finally. On the way back, we found a second supermarket that was even closer and was a European chain (Carrefour), which allowed us to get a few things that were more to our taste for breakfast. 

One of our challenges is has been the address on our Airbnb reservation is not actually the address where we are staying. This is exacerbated by our unfamiliarity of the street naming system. Knowing we wanted to take a cab from the airport, I was searching for a way to resolve the issue. I decided to try taking a picture our street sign and building number

Collection

Fortunately for us, the grandkids will be arriving at Taipei's second airport, the Songshan Airport, which is much closer into town than the main airport we arrive at. It is literally three metro stops from the station closest to us. We arrive in plenty of time to spare. The pictures I took worked like a charm and the cab dropped us of exactly in front of our apartment building. We did a little tour of the neighborhood, picked up some food items for them. We took a rest and went out for some dinner.

Returning to the apartment (let's hear it for young people carrying your heavy burdens)

 

We ate dinner at a place (there are so many food places around us it is crazy) the grandkids said is typical for a regular, 'just get a meal' type of place. You place your order, bring your own drinks, the food comes quickly, it is very good and very inexpensive.

First picture from top is braised pork, below is braised pork belly. Second picture is beef curry, and another braised pork. Vegetables of the day were something like bok choy, bamboo, bean sprouts, egg. There is also some braised peanuts in a bowl. Price for four people was $25.

This is definitely a 'late' culture. Nothing really opens until 11am and people are out all through the evening. We went for a walk afterwards and things were bustling.

Then we called it a day

Signs of the World

In Taipei, you have your choice of a variety of levels of cleaning. This is one of the highest.

Around The World In 72 Days - Three Days To Get Settled In Taipei, Taiwan

This post is intended to give you a true picture of the travel experience as Wife and I live it. We revel in going to new places and going through the process of taking the unfamiliar and making it 'your own'.  The start...

Wednesday 27 March 5:00am

Your reserved Uber whisks you on your way to Albuquerque International Sunport Airport. Despite having forgotten this is Easter week our airline status and TSA Pre we wiz through check-in and security. Literally, literally 41 minutes from leaving our house until we are waiting for our plane, including time to get coffee and a soda. 

Fly to San Francisco International Airport. Enjoy the fine cuisine on our United Airlines First Class Cabin consisting of packaged nuts, popcorn, etc. Don't care because I knew the plane we were flying and knew they weren't going to give us anything. 

We have a 5-hour layover in San Francisco. Go to the Polaris Lounge (snooty lounge for international business class travelers except there are so many of us that it loses a lot of the desired snooty appeal). We had decided to shower the night before and hope we could grab a shower at this lounge which we did. We knew we could eat at the Lounge. It was very crowded and we were just able to eek out a seat at a table. The breakfast buffet was marginal (our long wait meant we saw the change over to lunch where the quality and options where much better).

 

After the long wait we went and boarded our Boeing 777ER for Taipei. It will be a 14 hour flight. Wife and I have a ritual. It is always so stressful leading up to one of these big trips. We always seem to finally unwind when we are on the over ocean flight that will take us to our first destination. When they hand out that glass of bubbly wine before takeoff, that is the symbol of our body and mind relaxing.

Travel Hack (courtesy of my compadre in travel, the Count) - on United 777 and 787 business class, the bulkhead seats are significantly wider! We got them for this flight and were very glad we did. Made a big difference on a 14 hour flight.

One key I have found to minimizing the effect of jet lag is to manage your sleep pattern during the journey to get yourself on the time of where you are arriving. This is easier or more difficult depending on when you depart/arrive and the length of the trip. For example, when you fly to Europe from the United States, most flights depart in the early evening, fly over night, and arrive in Europe in the morning. So if you can sleep on that long flight (between 7 and 11 hours depending on where in the U.S. you are departing from), you can be pretty well adjusted when you arrive. 

However, a flight such as we took from the U.S. to Taiwan left at 1pm in the afternoon and arrives at 7:30pm (the next day). You are arriving at a time close to when you would want to be going to sleep in the local time. In this case you try to keep yourself up most of the flight. I take a 3 to 4 hour nap and a couple of shorter naps during a flight like this to manage the process.

Arrival at Taipei was smooth, there were not many flights at the hour we arrived so we went through passport control quickly. We are staying the first night (we've leapt forward a full day to Thursday evening the 28th) at a hotel that caters to air travelers. It is not in a 'touristy' part of town. I'd asked about a shuttle via Booking which I used to make the reservation. I did this a couple of days before leaving. I got the response while I was waiting for our luggage that we needed to make a reservation in advance. Thanks. No problem. We got cash at the ATM, and caught a cab. 

Despite the poor communication about the shuttle, somehow we got a room upgrade because the room was much nicer than the one I booked. There were about 4 buses parked overnight so I suspect they had a bunch of big tour groups filling many of the rooms

We were wiped out and went to bed very quickly once we got settled. Our next step on Friday the 29th was moving to our Airbnb apartment which will be our base for the next week. We could not go to the apartment until the afternoon, and decided to get out for a walk. Looking out our window, there didn't seem like a lot to see.

But out we went nonetheless

I have to say I was particularly impressed with this playground climbing contraption. Wish our grandchildren were still young.

Unfortunately the mall itself was not opening until 11am so we continued on our walk looking for something interesting. Here, as fate would have it, we encountered the 'mother lode' of serendipitous findings. Do you recognize it?

YES! You know what I am talking about

For those of you who are fans of the Costco snack bar, you will note the offerings in the Taiwan version are a bit different.

Finally we'd killed enough time. We had to check out of our room by Noon but were not being picked up until 1:30. The one restaurant in the hotel we were planning to go to was closed. However, a second one, a Japanese restaurant was open and we had a pleasant light meal of tempura. The hostess and waitress could not have been more pleasant and accommodating even bringing in our suitcases and then taking them out to car when we were done eating. 

We arrived our new apartment and underwent the orientation of all the rules and where things were. 90% of this is usually forgotten within minutes of the host leaving the apartment. If you use services like Airbnb and VRBO you know that what you find in the rental is often a bit (often quite a bit) less than what seems to be the case when you research it. This is always fun when you are still tired and jet lagged. 

Our next adventure was trying to find the supermarket we'd been told was close by. It IS close by...if you don't wander all over the place because you are disoriented! Then there is the always fun time of trying to buy food in the supermarket of a culture where you 'normal' food items are 'exotic'. In this case, there was one tiny pack of butter in the whole store. Butter is not a big thing in Taiwanese cooking. 

Our last adventure of the day was finding a place for dinner. There were two challenges. First, don't get hopelessly lost while doing it. Second, find something you halfway understand what you are eating. Fortunately, we are in a neighborhood where there are so many eating options available that we had a multitude of options available in just a few blocks around us. (I was very careful about how we did our search so as to make sure we could make it back to the apartment.) Unfortunately, we couldn't make heads nor tails of much of the food options.

Wife was very much in the mood for something with rice and vegetables. That would be pretty standard in an American Chinese restaurant. However, 'real' Chinese cooking in a place like Taiwan is NOTHING like what we have at home. So we wandered around until we found a Vietnamese place. They must be pretty new. A pleasant young woman listened to us and pointed out what they had that met Wife's cravings. It was a good find. 

Wife's braised chicken, steamed vegetables and rice. She really enjoyed it.

I had the classic Pho which was a very good rendition of the dish.

After our meal, we came back to the apartment where not too long after coming back we collapsed again. Thus after three days, we were finally ensconced in our Taipei, Taiwan residence. 

But before I sign off, we must initiate that ongoing feature of the de-I blogesphere...

SIGNS OF THE WORLD

Seriously. This is the logo for a major chain of dim sum restaurants.

Clearly there is a difference in how the Western and Asian mind work to find the image above as appetite inducing!

Around The World In 72 Days - A de-I / Wife Travel Adventure - The Concept

 It has been quite some time since Wife and I did any serious, multi-country travel. The last few years, we were focusing on our experiments with staying in one country and even one locale in a country to see if we liked living there. With our deciding that was not a practical dream, we started to consider going back traveling as we'd done before. 

One of the bigger questions was would we physically be able to travel as we'd done in the past. We'd been looking at long-term stay travel in large part because diminishing physical ability had made our prior style of travel more difficult. But, offsetting that were a number of things we wanted to accomplish because of disrupted plans in 2020. These included a trip we had planned with two of our grandchildren, 2.2 and 2.3, and a first trip to Ghana for Wife. Originally the logistics of this were easier as the grandchildren of daughter #2 and husband 2B, were in Ukraine. Now they are living in China. Then there was a desire to visit China one more time since #2 and 2B were living there but are scheduled to leave this summer.

Put China and Ghana on the map and decide you want to do this in one trip and you get...

AROUND THE WORLD!

This has been one of my dreams for quite some time. To accomplish the goal of doing something with the grandkids (now 18 and 17 respectively) we decided to stop in Taipei. That's an easy flight from Shanghai where they live. The first phase of our trip then is in Taipei, Taiwan. We were there in 2017 and loved it. 

Then we've decided to head back to Shanghai with the kids where we will be cashing the frequent travel points we've earned with Poo Lee Shah Travels (you earn triple points with them when you agree to go via crazy Asian discount airlines or if you survive the Asian Granny Elbow Fight Boarding Process) to stay at the (according to the marketing material) 'Palatial Poo Lee Shah Shanghai Gardens Resort and Cat Haven'. You may remember the fabulous service and exquisite suite when we went on with them to Hong Kong. So we are excited beyond belief. We are going to spend 3-weeks in the Middle Kingdom, where we will be going all over the place. I will layout the specifics of that itinerary when we arrive there.

If one has experienced the pleasure of an intense Poo Lee Shah Travels trip, it will not surprise you that Wife and I decided we needed to go somewhere simply to relax and recuperate before heading on to the final leg of our trip, Ghana, because I know that any trip to Ghana would not be particularly relaxing given all we want. I really wanted to go to Sri Lanka where we'd never been but the logistics and cost of the airfare to get there were not practical. After researching options in both Malaysia and Thailand, we settled on two-week stay in Krabi Thailand. Seriously, in planning this trip, I figured that getting sufficient rest would be critical to maintaining our health.

After our Thai beach interlude, we are on to the last major part of the trip, Ghana. The goal for Ghana is multi-fold. First, Wife has never met any of the people whom I've been working with these last five years. So her meeting and seeing things first hand is one reason. But also, I've never actually done any touring in Ghana. My whole experience has been Theodora, going in and going out to do the work. We are going to be scheduling three-weeks visiting the capital city Accra (which, of course, is where I spend most of my time), the West Coast Takoradi area, and the old Ashanti Kingdom capital of Kumasi. To get to Ghana, we're taking Turkish Airlines. We were able to get a fare that allowed us to stay in Istanbul for a day and two nights and have added that into the itinerary. 

I am writing this from Taipei and will be getting you all the information of our getting to and getting settled in Taiwan in my next post.

Elder Fleet Mission Orders

 We have received our briefing. We will take possession of the Eldership at 07:00 hours Mission Central Time. However, we have been instructed to unseal and review our orders tonight. 

"Commanders de-I and Wife,

You have been selected for this mission as you have shown your ability to navigate the intricacies of the semi-civilized world of Earth. You are needed to conduct another reconnaissance mission to help us determine whether we aid the progress of this world or eliminate as a cancer cell. 

For this mission you will need to circumnavigate the entire globe. You will start your mission at the locale you have established for your permanent disguise, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. From here you will proceed to Taipei, Taiwan. After conducting information in Taipei, you will be required to enter the mysterious Middle Kingdom, The People's Republic of China. In the PRC, we want you to infiltrate Shanghai, Xian, Guilin, Hangzhou, & Nanjing. 

We will then ask you to continue your ongoing research in the southern peninsula that comprises Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Myanmar. You will specifically spend time in the Thai city of Krabi with transits in Kuala Lumpur. 

Finally we will be sending you back to Ghana, West Africa with a transit in Istanbul. However, now we want you out of the capital of Accra in cities such as Takoradi, Cape Coast, Elmira, Kumasi, and Prampram. 

Then you will return to the home base. We wish you success on your mission!

ELDER FLEET OFFICERS - REPORT FOR DUTY!

All Elder Fleet Officers are required to relinquish their current on planet duties. You will assemble at Eldership Command on 25 March wherein you will receive your orders. The Eldership has been refurbished and is ready to sally forth at 0700 hours on 27 March. You will receive your orders on 26 March. This is a mission of the utmost importance. We are confident you will do your duty.

Crisis Averted

 I was going to write this post on Wednesday and it would have just been titled 'Crisis'. Two days and positive movement has seemed to lessen the threat.

On Thursday, I started my day with almost frantic messages from the Theodora Ghana team that their internet was completely unstable and unusable. As we had a very early Rotary meeting they manage (acting as host, running slides, etc.), I had to jump in. I then started hearing from others in Ghana about lack of internet. 

It turned out this was no minor issue. All four of the underseas cables carrying internet traffic from South Africa to Europe were damaged. All of them! Approximately 8 countries including Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, & Benin were affected and it was almost a complete outage. Even banks were unable to function. I was unable to reach anyone on my team.

As I finally learned what the issue was, a grim thought started to come into my head. We were out of business. We would not be able to communicate with clients. We could not do any work for them. I started to think of options such as going to some U.S. providers. But I didn't really think we could pull that off because of cost, time, and the inability to communicate to even find out what to do.

On Saturday, I decided to try a regular phone call and reached my manager. On Sunday, there was some internet and we were connecting through WhatsApp. We determined regular mobile phone communication would work (but it is expensive). Also that they could get most of their work done if they worked late at night when there were fewer people on line. 

We'll see how things go today. It seems that we will be able to function.

Sunday Dinner With Friends

 For a variety of reasons, it is rare for us to entertain anymore. I big part, as I have written in the past, is I find it much more difficult physically to cook. Plus, Wife and I both tire early in the evening and don't have much appetite in the evening. But we are not that fond of going out to restaurants. I find them too pricey for the value, always feel rushed, and uncomfortable. But we had friends who'd just returned from a trip to New Zealand and Australia. If we didn't catch up with them soon, it would be a long while before we could.

We had them over for what we call our 'Sunday French Dinner'. This our eating at around 2pm on Sunday. We find we have plenty of time to talk and relax, have our best appetite, and never get too tired. I wanted to have a light meal yet with some culinary variety. AND i did not want to cook on the day of the meal. So I prepared the following. It only took me 3 hours on Saturday to accomplish. Everything was designed to be served at room temperature.

Potato Leek Soup - I finished it with cream, butter and finely chopped green onions

Fritatta - Made with onions, mushrooms, asparagus, and zucchini.

Marinated Roasted Bell Peppers - Marinated with anchovy paste, onion paste, garlic paste, olive oil and lemon juice. Finished with orange zest, orange juice, and salt cured capers.

Braised Celery - Cooked in Sicilian flavored broth, onions and garlic. Finished with a touch of chile flavored olive oil.

Homemade Pickles - Salt cured baby cucumber slices flavored with vinegar and sugar.

Our guests brought a lovely New Zealand, Central Otago, Chardonnay. I had a French Chablis, made with the same grape which were interesting to compare.

A great time was had.

Back To School

As I have written, the Theodora Project that has consumed so much of my life over the last half decade, has suddenly solidified. Things that were so much acts of faith during our first years have become solid and real during the last year and a half. Now, we are not just some hopeful venture thinking we can transform woman with little to no background and experience in what we want them to become. We've done it!

Sometimes I feel I am in a dream and I have to do something to make myself wake up and realize that we've attained the early most vision. But, as with all things in life, there really is no 'destination'. There is only a stop on the never ending 'transformation highway'. 

So I have become painfully aware that my long developed skills as a business advisor are not what are needed to take my team forward. What is needed is that I be a true business manager and leader. Something I have had no experience. This has motivated me to join a peer group mentoring organization that combines facilitated meetings with hands on coaching so I can actually become better as CEO and manager. 

Never too late to learn!

How Far Have We Come?

As just a slight hint for loyal readers, a vast increase in the number of posts will arrive in the not to distant future. "Hmmm", you say. "Might this involve travel?" Well beloved blog follower, yes it might. 

I was doing some research for this 'project' and looking over some posts from 2016. This was only 2 years into our post transition life devoted to travel. We were taking our first significant trip to Asia and I wrote about getting there. I was quite taken by the length of time (27 hours), number of flights, being in business class and what it took to get business class, and dealing with international airports. 

Fast forward to 2024. Wife and I have done a fair bit more travel internationally. Shoot I have taken 17 trips to Ghana alone since 2019. Now we go through and look at the routes and consider among other things;

• Length of the total flight.
• The aircraft we will be on.
• The quality of the business class seat.
• The overall service on the airline.
  
• Can we use points or is it a better deal to use $$.
• What is the quality of the cuisine on the airline?
• Will we have enough time after an overnight flight to catch a shower at the business class lounge?
• Is it better to have a shorter flight with tighter connections or a longer flight with more time in between flights to reduce stress?
• Is the trade-off of a lower cost worth the extra travel time? (Spoiler alert, less and less as we get older).
• Understanding that 'airport world' is its own reality and every international airport is pretty much the same as any other.
  
• 27 hours? That seems pretty much the norm for any significant international travel

Hoping to take this knowledge and experience and continuing to use it as long as we can.