Part of the reason our kids could join us for Christmas is because our regional family gathering happened the week after in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Kaohsiung is the southernmost major metropolis in Taiwan. And while I’ve been to Taiwan multiple times to visit our headquarters in Chiayi, this was a new city for me to visit. And Taiwan is a country our kids haven’t been to. So coming out to spend Christmas together *and* getting another notch in their passports **AND** getting to hang out with the friends they made last year at the gathering was not a difficult sell!
We flew from Medan to Kuala Lumpur, necessitating an overnight stay in order to catch the morning flight the next day to Taiwan. We arrived in Taoyuan, near Taipei and home to Taiwan’s international airport, in the early afternoon. We planned to wait until the evening to take the High Speed Rail to Kaohsiung so we could ride along with friends. This left a few hour span of time to kill.
Amazingly, we have friends in Taiwan. Jeff and Manchu are friends that go back to our days in Arizona doing campus ministry to international students at Arizona State University. Jeff was doing his doctoral work when Gena and I first met him. During that time he met Manchu who was also studying there, and they fell in love and were married not long after Gena and I were. After Jeff completed his studies he got a job with Intel, and has been with Intel pretty much ever since, moving around from the Northwest USA to the southern coast of California and then back home to Taiwan. We’ve been blessed to get to see them in many of these locales.
So we arranged to have a late lunch/early dinner with them in Taoyuan. Unfortunately their kids couldn’t make it because of school, but we had a great time of catching up together and introducing them to our now much older kids. The last time we met up with them was probably close to a decade ago, so there have been a few changes since then. Just in the kids, of course. All us adults look exactly the same as we did a decade ago. Truly.
We finished dinner and met our friends at the High Speed Rail station to buy our tickets and head south to Kaohsiung. We arrived close to 11pm and were lucky even to get enough tickets for the ten of us on the same train! It’s amazing you can travel 330 kilometers (just over 200 miles) in about 90 minutes on a high-speed train! Unfortunately it was dark so we couldn’t appreciate the scenery. But watching lights blur by is also a fascinating experience!
The Nelson Family Indonesia 