Year 3. Check.

A 2019 print celebrating the year of the pig. We’ve collected one from varying artists for each year/animal: ’16 monkey, ’17 rooster, ’18 dog.

Hi. Happy 2019! Well, 3 years and 3 months just flew by. It’s been a blur.

2018 Highlights
  1. Traveling and exploring the world from here is still one of the things we enjoy the most. Despite most of our blog posts we aren’t always on vacation, just trying hard to explore as much as we can before this assignment is over. Most of our destinations are short flights from Taiwan.
  2. Hosted lots of wonderful faces: Steve/Kendra, The Berggren family, Mark, and Alison/Aaron. Lots of repeat visitors came through town too: Allison/Kevin/Sid and Cat. Always so grateful when friends and fam visit us. Thank you!
  3. Welcomed new Nike families to Taichung and suddenly we are now the ones giving advice to new people about living in Taiwan. Our apartment building became the hot place to live too! Michelle/Alex/Eloise and Patti/Mike moved in to our building – which is named “Living in Art” (don’t ask why). Other work friends also relocated to Taiwan from Nike: Arati/Kelly and their twins from Portland and Mark from Shanghai. There are about 24 Nike expat families here today.
  4. Fatty Liver Nights continue, a friend tradition we started in ’16 with Al and Kev of exploring untested and curiously interesting restaurants – although not as frequently as we’d like. It nudges us to keep exploring the unknown nooks in this city! Background on the name: all westerners were given a mild fatty liver diagnosis at our yearly Taiwan health exams.
  5. Accepted that we will never understand everything or even half of what’s going on. Yes, frustrating at times. The silver lining is we have gained more empathy for everyone living or traveling in a foreign land. Be nice. Be patient. Be helpful. It makes a difference. Taiwan has been all these things to us.
  6. Continue to “meet ourselves” which was the most brilliant advice/insight we got before our USA departure. It came from Julie R. at Nike. She said, “The first person you will meet when you get off the plane will be… YOURSELF”. Spot on.
  7. Made the kiss cam at the Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium. What’s left to do here?!

Day to Day

A slice of day to day life over here are in our “hidden living” blog pages (menu in upper right hand corner) – pages we continually update which is why we don’t post them like the others.

Taiwan Observations  |  Started in Jan. 2016 and added to ever since. Reached 100!

Movies  |  Would LOVE if you shared your favs. We love vegging out, in English.

Books  |  Passionfruit is a more active poster, but here’s Pickles’ list too.


Gratefuls

A favorite new year tradition is opening our Jar of Gratefuls that we write throughout the year. Always lots of sweet reminders of all the small and big things that make life so perfectly… life. Love when guests sneak one in the jar too. Oh yea, I wear readers now?!


Work / Play

Still doing graphic freelance/consulting with clients in the states which keeps me just busy enough and grateful to have some work over here. I finished taking mandarin lessons and steadily still play Mahjong with a bunch of fun women. I own my own set so prepare for the PDX mahjong club when I return. Jane, do you see your doppelganger? We still get out biking in the hills near our apartment and Scott tries to bike to work once a week which is a 2 hour ride! He’s lucky to work with a bunch of recreational riders.


Networking hard

Scott used his beer connections and got not one, but two kegs tapped at the Taichung Nike office. It’s the finest craft beer in all of Taiwan, Taihu! It attracts more social gatherings than the watercooler.


Making art

After some internal debate about sharing my artwork I decided I would put it out there, somewhere. Let me know what you think! Sarah on Instagram. I’ve always been drawn to working with found leaves and natural objects. Then the onion skins joined the art party in 2015. It brings me joy and provides a balance to all things digital.


Started a dangerous habit

Bread making from a wild yeast starter! I was paralyzed for weeks just looking at it. Now we’re buddies and I feed it and love it and am making edible bread.


Urban gardening

A pineapple is growing on our balcony! It’s almost as exciting as beekeeping. We started this plant from a pineapple we ate the first month we moved here – 3 years ago! Isn’t it the cutest?


Missing

We still get sad about the lack of pets. Poppy the wobbly cat is still living large in Nebraska with the big-hearted Team Toth family. Lexi-Lulu the corgi is still in Montana with the granddogparents and likes to butt dial us for facetime hellos.


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From Taichung, lots of love from us, Handsome Tiger & Can Do Ox (new nicknames and stamps inspired from our zodiac animals).

 

 

4 thoughts on “Year 3. Check.

  1. I love this! You guys have set the bar high with living the life over here…thank you for helping us follow in your footsteps! You are the BEST tour guides 🙂

  2. Go Mathletes!
    Nice work Scott on getting the Taiwan noble brew for all the worker bees! By the way, Scott I see Ted Cruz has picked up on your very hot facial hair stylings! So very very—how do you say…? Que? Muy Badass! Now see what you can do for Beto.

    Hope you Bali trip is perfecto. Sarah, love all your art, friends and insights… and especially your adventures in cuisine.

    I’ll keep you posted via MRS (My Rhubarb SkyCam and the HughesNet Smyrna Spinach Uplink. Also we have now—The Jersey Cow Gazette & Community Pet Finder with the inset flyer from the Garage Sale Courier Penny-Saver, sponsored by BBs: Bangs, Bents and Bargains—-Steve Sculley from C-Span reads it daily on his Washington Journal —swears by it. So he says! Be good xxxxx KTG

  3. Ahhh such a fabulous post full of wit and wisdom! Miss you two. Can’t wait to hear about Bali adventures!

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