No Daylight Savings Here....

As you all in the US deal with daylight savings changing, we have no such thing here! It's actually kind of nice not to have to readjust to a new level of light outside when you wake up or go home from work. So for the record, Taiwan is +13 hours from Eastern Time and now +14 hours from Central Time. So when you are at work at 9am on Monday morning, I'm hopefully on my way to bed at 11pm here in Taipei. Never works out that easily though.

A successful Halloween in Taiwan. It's rather hard to find costumes here, but Sarah did a pretty good job. You'll see I added a bunch of new photo albums on the right side. Sarah's Bday and Halloween thrown together. She went as a bottle of ketchup (and did a very nice job on the costume) and I just wore a spider hat because I ran all out of creative juices after all the excitement the past couple of weeks. There is no trick or treating here, nor do people appreciate horror flicks, scary houses, corn mazes.... Glad I can appreciate Halloween back in the US next year!

Sunday was our first open water dive for scuba training and we had an absolutely perfect day to go to Keelung on the NE side of Taiwan. We were as far NE as you can go, basically looking out over the Pacific Ocean and across the water towards Japan:



We had some rain at 7am when we were out there, but by the time we were ready to dive around 8am, the sun was popping out. The waves were kind of high, so we decided to only do one tank's worth of diving for the day. In the hour that we were under water, it was absolutely incredible! We had about 3 meters of visibility down below, and made it to about 10 meters deep and explored along the bottom of the ocean - but the experience far exceeded our expectations. We saw many clown fish (Think of Finding Nemo) and the very bright blue fish all over. Even saw some baby clown fish that were maybe a day old. Lots of plant life under there, a star fish, and my favorite - the BLOWFISH. Our instructor even tried to piss one off to get it to blow up in defense but was unable. Guess we're not threatening enough.

Pictures on the right of Keelung coastal area. It was about 80 degrees with a nice breeze off the water. One of the most beautiful days I've experienced since I arrived here 7 months ago. We're planning a separate weekend trip to Kenting just for Scuba Diving later this month. Should be an awesome opportunity since the visibility there is more like 10 meters. Then another trip to Green Island off the SE coast of Taiwan where the visibility can be 30 meters!!! Now to find an underwater camera to take with us.....

The election is coming - and seriously, the whole world is talking about it. Everyone here is considering Tuesday/Wednesday as very important days and everyone will ask, "did you vote"? Of course I voted!!! And I hope all of you vote, no matter who you vote for. If you don't vote, then you have no right to complain is the rule I go by. That's why you see me complain about the past 8 years of hell we've endured. I at least tried to change it....

Have a good Monday....