Sunday evening in the neighborhood

What does it mean when you meet someone you know in the local grocery store?

When you have lived for less than 3 weeks in a city of 1 million people, 6,000 miles from the place you’ve called “home” for 19 years, it means something different than it does in that “old Kentucky home.”

This evening, we ran into Hong and Ken and their 3 children in the Capit’an grocery store. Hong and Ken worked with us at Corning in Harrodsburg, KY and have lived here in Taichung for several years. It made me feel just a little less “new” and “foreign.” I had found someone to chat with in the store!

Before shopping at that store, we had taken a walk to explore the neighborhood and found a “restaurant row.” A few gems that we’ll have to check out sometime are a Sushi “conveyor belt” restaurant, as well as “Ice Monster” with a variety of hot and cold drinks including smoothies, and “Big Tom” for ice cream, complete with a cow and calf statue outside.

Next we went to the open air fruit and vegetable market and got a long thin eggplant and some peppers, which Dan is cooking with pasta for tonight’s dinner, a lime so we can have a gin and tonic later, some tangerines for lunch this week, and green beans and baby corn for tomorrow’s meal. For that we spent about 250 NT$, or about $8 US.

We headed off to Taichung-gang Rd. to shop for Suncakes to bring to Andrea’s teacher friends in France. Suncakes is a specialty from Taichung. They probably won’t stand up to French pastries, but will be something different and exotic to bring as a little gift for the people who have been so kind to Andrea during her teaching assignment in Oyonnax. We’ll be heading to France in about a week, stopping off in Danville for a few days on the way. We’re looking forward to checking in briefly with friends and family in the US, and to our special vacation with Andrea in France and Italy. But even so, it feels right to be settling in here in Taichung.

Right, and hot! We worked up a sweat carrying our bags back to the apartment - it was quite warm and not much breeze stirring, even at 7 pm. After leaving our bags in the apartment, we went back out to Capit’an for some meat for dinner and some bagels for breakfast - and found our friends Hong and Ken, and felt like just a bit more like we were home.