We arrived in Taipei on September 15th in the afternoon. Grace's parents met us at the airport, which was very nice. We were both a little out of it from all the travel and jet lag, despite the shady miracle drug my parents express ordered from New Zealand. It may have actually helped - it's hard to be sure since I haven't done enough traveling involving major time zone changes lately to have a good comparison.

The airport is a bit outside Taipei, so the cab ride to our hotel took about half an hour. Our hotel was an interesting mix of old and new - or maybe just things I am used to and things I am not used to. No swipe card for the door. Just a regular key (that you leave at the front office when you depart the hotel for the day). A mostly clever but occasionally irritating system is a little slot by the door in your room into which you deposit the key. This allows all the lights to turn on. It's nice, since when you're leaving you can just leave everything on, take the key out, and it will shut off. Less nice when it also unpowers the outlets your laptop, camera, whatever is plugged into for charging.

The hotel also had incredibly fast internet (around 60Mbps, or 6 times what I was happy to get in Arlington), but no WiFi. Not sure why these things tend to happen. Maybe Taiwan just developed so quickly that by the time WiFi was common everyone already had fast wireless internet through their phones? Anyway, not a big deal. Figured out how to use my laptop to broadcast a wireless signal from an ethernet connection for our other devices (handy to know!).

Also, Taiwan (and maybe a lot of East Asia) is all about hard beds. The bed in the hotel was maybe the hardest one I've ever slept on. Left me really sore the first couple days but was actually pretty nice after that.

Unfortunately, I don't think Taiwan caters to a whole lot of people in the 2m and up height range, so the ceilings were a bit low, and I didn't exactly fit in the shower.

After checking in to the hotel, Grace, her parents, and I went out to dinner at a nearby restaurant. Lots of good food, particularly Peking duck (so good!). Grace and I were in a fugue state at this point, so went right to bed after dinner. It was nice to be done with flying for a little while.