Happy Mother's Day

Originally we planned to take my mom to an experimental forest near central Taiwan, but the weather was too unstable and wet. Bill and I went for a walk after breakfast, trying to come up with another idea. Sunday morning (before 10) is the best time to go for a walk in Taipei. It's quiet and clean. Well...... most importantly, there are not so many psychotic bus drivers on the road yet. You also discover cheerful surprises that you may overlook during daily commute. For example, we found these pretty flowers on the sidewalk near National Taiwan University. We have never seen them before, and we live near the university!









After walking for a while, Bill suggested that we went for a drive along the coast. He said if the weather wasn't good, we could always think of it as storm-watching. When we told my mom the idea, she immediately agreed. She told us that she had seen a TV show talking about a white Mediterranean coffee shop on the coastline, and she really wanted to go there to have coffee.









The weather, as you can see, worsened as the day went on. However, the amazing thing about beaches is that, whatever the weather condition might be, you can always find beauty at the beach. We had lunch at a harbor (and later discovered that they have whale-watching boats there too) and stopped wherever we saw interesting. My mom kept an eye out for anything white. Everytime she saw one, she went, "Uh!... No.... that's not white." After a while, Bill and I started teasing her about this "imaginary" coffee shop. I told her that we were gonna make her walk home if we couldn't find it.















We were out on the coast for about six hours, making a loop from the east coast up north then back down to Taipei. The traffic wasn't as bad as we expected, and we were back in Taipei just in time for Mother's Day dinner with Karen.

We never found a white Mediterranean coffee shop, but we had lots of fun.