Pretty pink umbrellas

(It's now actually Monday morning here - I could not stay awake worth beans last night, so I slept and am back at it this morning. It's 4:30am here and I can't sleep. Shockingly, I'm not nervous about getting Colby in 6 hours (although typing that did make my stomach lurch). I've just not been able to sleep much more than 6 hours here. Wish that were the case back home!)

We played cribbage until lunch time and not having heard yet from our friends the Echols, we headed out to find something. I tried to get back the message we'd left them earlier regarding meeting us for lunch and replace it with a new one telling them when we thought we'd head over to the jade market, but something got lost in translation. I just asked to leave a new message and after I'd filled it out, the desk clerk noted that they already had another message at which point I said, "Yes! That's my message! Can I have it back, please?" He wasn't so sure, but then decided it'd be okay. Ha ha. We thought maybe we'd try the Italian place not far from our hotel so we set off. Well, pasta was $10 and we can get a lot of Chinese food for that price, so we crossed the street and thought we'd head back and have a McMeal. It was kind of raining again so truth be told we just wanted to find some food in a hurry and make sure we got something in our stomachs (the bakery breakfast was good, but the scrumptious muffin/cake we had was a little lighter than we thought and we were pretty hungry!). As we were walking down the sidewalk I heard "Sarah!!!!" and turned to see Nicole and Eric across the street. I waved and Steve (who hadn't seen them as they were in a doorway to a store and also hadn't heard that it was my name they'd yelled) gave me a look like "what on earth are you doing, woman? WHO could you possibly know here?!"

We crossed the street and learned that they'd bought umbrellas from a hole in the wall shop for about $100 NT. We decided to go get some lunch together and then stop by the hole in the wall to pick up some umbrellas for ourselves. We went to Fang's and let me tell you the hullabaloo isn't for nothing! We had dumplings, fried rice, and fried noodles and they were AMAZING. We shared some guava juice(much better tasting than the actual fruit we'd had the day before) and Taiwan beer with our new friends and had the best time. The Echols are so down to earth and friendly and so easy to talk with! What a blessing! Lunch was a bit expensive at about $20/couple, but it lasted us well into the evening before we were hungry again and it would certainly have cost far more at home (and was way better than the Italian place would've been!). It was truly worth every penny and I can assure you we'll be eating there again before we head home.

A short walk later we were able to select from a happy variety of umbrellas in every shade of the rainbow. I picked a pink one with koalas on it that we'll let Kailin have when we go home and Steve got a blue one with flowers (also my choice as the remaining ones were rather....heinous).

We decided to give the jade market, flower market, and night market a shot even though it was still drizzling a little bit. A quick trip back to the hotel to drop off their purchases/pick up necessities/make pit stops and we had the desk call us a cab. "Cab 668 will be here in 3 minutes." and he was right on. Off we went - always an experience to take a cab in a foreign country and this was no different!