Apparently their was an earthquake here last Thursday, 25th Jan., I had no idea until someone told me on Monday, it was 5 point something on the Richter scale!
Everyone says you don’t worry about these things as they are a fairly common occurrence here! If you look at the island of Taiwan, formerly Formosa, you will see it looks rather like an upside down cocoon, or pupae, I am not sure which? Taipei is in the north and I believe the earthquake took place on the southeast coastal area, still it is only a little island!
Another thing we have to contend with here are Typhoons, again, I am told not to worry, just be sure to have food and water supplies and candles/batteries. I shall wait and see!!!!

Continuing my Mandarin lessons! Also started a Chinese paper cutting class yesterday, it is great my problem comes with folding the paper, once you have to start dividing it into odd numbered sections then I get lost as my math skills are none existent, however I have bought a protractor and am great at the cutting out so should be able to produce some good examples.
One of the ladies I met was going to lunch with a few other women so two of us from the class went along too. We had a lovely Sri Lanken meal (similar to Indian food). One thing that is important here is to accept any and all invitations, especially when you are new, as sitting alone in one’s apartment all day is not conducive to ones happiness!!

Their is a massive book sale taking place in Taipei at the moment so we plan to go this w/e not that I need any more books what with the collection in UK and all the ones we accumulated while in Bangkok, I could start a library!
We do need books here as the Television is really bad, we have cable but the channels are awful and the content is really old. I am reduced to watching an Australian Asian program and a travel and living channel. It is so bad Dave and I took ourselves off on Wed. night to the movies. We are fortunate in that we have a new theater right next door to the apartment building, we went to see Miss Potter, brilliant. I, we spent all my childhood holidays in “The Lakes”, loved the scenes in Lakeland and we both enjoyed the whole story, all the actors were good.

I am slowly bringing order to the apartment and also cleaning it, ugh. I am having to relearn how to clean, well not quite but it is a pain, however, I don’t let it interfere with my other activities, after all the cleaning will still be there long after I am gone!