Home at last-- a brief recap

Whew! Back online after 2 weeks away from the computer. Had about 170 personal and 250 work emails to sift through this morning, not to mention a flurry of blog activity to catch up on. But first, I thought I'd give a quick summary of my trip. There's so much to tell about various other aspects of the trip, I think I'll save them for separate, individual entries.

We left the house at about 9pm Sunday, Oct 12, and our flight took off on time at 1:40am on Monday, Oct 13. We used Eva Air, a Taiwan-based airline-- and it was NICE. Even in economy class, where we sat, the seats were wider than usual and there was plenty of legroom. Most big aircraft designed for flying overseas have video screens built into the seat back in front of you, with various programs to watch-- but Eva had video/TV on demand-- you could pick what you wanted to watch whenever you wanted to watch it, and even pause, rewind and fast-forward as you pleased! The 14-hour flight to Taiwan was made more bearable by the fact that it was me and my parents sharing the row of 3 seats. No worries about shoving Dad aside for more elbow room, or accidentally kicking Mom while shifting positions :-D

We had a 12-hour layover in Taiwan, where we partook of one of their free day tours specifically designed for people with long layovers there. This was the first time I'd ever seen an Asian city, and the sights and sounds were definitely different from what I was used to-- even the streets of various Chinatowns in North America (LA, San Francisco, Vancouver) were distinctly different. More on that later.

Another 5-hour flight later, we touched down in Indonesia at around 10pm Tuesday night, were picked up by various family members, and settled down in our hotel room at the Sheraton, which happened to be located right next to one of Surabaya's newest and glitziest shopping centers-- a 6-story mall with 3 wings, rivaling the Mall of America in size!

The following week was a whirlwind of activity: shopping and meeting various people. Since the main purpose of the trip was to see family members that a) I had never met and b) my parents hadn't seen in years, we spent most of it seeing various aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces. I met my grandparents (Dad's parents) for the first time, my parents' siblings, and a handful of cousins, some with little kids of their own. Every day, it seemed, I met someone new. It wasn't long before I lost track of who was whom if they weren't within the core circle of direct family (aunts, uncles and first cousins)-- and even then, what a large circle it was! The culmination of these reunions was a big party on Sunday, Oct 19-- with most of my dad's extended family plus several friends he hadn't seen in so long, either. There must have been at least 90+ of us that descended on one restaurant :-)

We departed Surabaya at 11pm on Tuesday, Oct 21, had another 12-hour layover in Taiwan where we did some sightseeing on our own, and arrived safe and sound in LA on Wednesday afternoon. Thankfully the tail wind drove down the previous 14-hour-trip to only 11 hours. I spent the next couple days at my parents' house, recuperating, unpacking and cleaning up, before returning to Santa Barbara on Saturday afternoon.

While in Indonesia, my mom's brother lent us his driver and car for the week, so we were pretty mobile. The driver was also really cool about driving us around the city and showing us the sights, particularly the places where my mom and where my dad used to live. So a lot of my sightseeing was done from inside a nicely-insulated, air-conditioned, moving vehicle. As a result, I don't have very many pictures-- most of the pics we did take were of friends and family members-- again, this was primarily a family reunion trip, not a sightseeing trip. We hope to go again sometime soon in the future, and this time I'll bring along Todd and Allan, and hope to get some more proper pictures taken.

In the meantime, I jotted down lots of notes about the things I DID see, even from the car-- like the huge 2-story McDonaldses, the unique bathrooms/toilets, the crazy traffic, and the juxtaposition of rich+new with poor+old along the city streets. I hope to blog about them later-- and maybe, hopefully, paint some pictures with my words to make up for the lack of actual photographs. Hope you have an active imagination to picture the coming stories! :-)