My first blogger meeting.

So Sunday night was my first 'internet meeting'. Now, meeting people you meet in chat rooms is always a bad idea, there are a lot of weirdos faking it, but I feel blogs are different, because you'd really have to do a lot of work to make a fake identity on a blog. But just to be safe, I gave Jo my phone number and asked her to call me when she got to Taipei. I wasn't going to agree to a meeting time and place until I heard a female British accent on the other end of the line! The precautions were unneccessary, and we had a great time on Sunday.

There was a series of small 'bumps' in the road that meant we didn't actually meet up till after 10! Then we wandered around the Taipei Main Station area, looking for food and chatting. Jo's postgrad degree is in Journalism and she used to work for the BBC, so we had lots to talk about outside of comparing teaching ESL in Taiwan and Japan. And we saw two very odd groups of people: first, in one of the restaurants we tried to eat at, there was a group of Amish people, sitting around a table with multiple bottles of Taiwan Beer! I was shocked, and felt like taking a picture. Later Kathy explained that they were probably Mennonites, some of whom have more lax rules on drinking yet still wear headcoverings. The other odd group was a bunch of Spainish ballroom dancers. They were tanned and beautiful and overdressed. I really had to fight to keep from staring, it was like the cast of "Strictly Ballroom" on a Taipei streetcorner at midnight. I decided I should go to the Taipei Main Station area more often. One sees the oddest things.

It was very nice to come home to a sister. When she first moved here I was worried about losing the independence of being able to come and go whevever I liked without anyone worrying about me. But I came home to a light under the door and got to tell Kathy all about my evening. And she hadn't been worried at all. I told her I had expected her to call to ensure I hadn't been abducted by crazy internet psychos. The thought had never occurred to her. Then I went to fall into bed and found she had gotten my sheets out of the dryer and made the bed, how sweet.