h o m e

Helle, sorry, maybe you don't want to read this :-S
I'm home! After the worst and longest bout of homesickness I've ever been through, after 3 months and 11 days, after the longest time I've ever been away from Taipei in the 4 years since I first came here in November 2001. I got all excited being among so many Taiwanese during check-in. I didn't sleep for a second on the plane (and instead caught up on movies I'd missed like The Island or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and checked out all the Chinese cds on demand). And I cried when the first peaks of Taiwan came up through the clouds and on the bus all down Zhongshan North Road.
I just had a perfectly plain normal Saturday with Reiner, with a sandwich breakfast, the usual Flower and Jade Market trip including checking-out the give-away pets (a tiny, still blue-eyed Tuesday and some beautiful Tugou puppies), a stop-over at Bade Road and Guanghua Market for roaming all the DVD stores (only bought like 12 – I’d have expected more new stuff after 3 months), a big bowl of beef noodles with some tofu + hundred-year eggs, a quick afternoon nap, an evening stroll around Shida including hijacking Reiner’s cell phone for textmessaging (and having him tell me that I'm not supposed to walk while text-messaging ;-)), peaks into shoe shops, an onion-egg pancake and my first pearl-milk tea in 3 months :) :). And two videos before going to bed.
And it’s nicely warm and humid, and I can still speak Chinese, and I feel completely at home and less than half as weird and out of place as I do in Germany.