I'm back..............

.....in the Taiwan. I got back into Taichung late Saturday night (actually 12:30 Sunday morning) and had a wonderful Taiwanese welcome, brought to me by Freego Buslines. After 20+ hours of traveling, we finally pulled up in front of the Sogo Department store close to my apartment. The bus was full - I actually didn't have a seat, but one man put his tiny daughter on this lap and let me sit next to him - hence, there was lots of luggage in the cargo hold under the bus.

The driver didn't bother coming out, he just let me and another girl off and only opened one of the hatches. The girl crawled in and dragged her suitcase out. I reached in and grabbed one of mine (I had 2), put it down beside the bus and saw my other one was out of reach. So I put followed suit and crawled in to get the second one....and then the door closed and the bus started pulling away!

So I yelled "hey!", but the bus didn't stop. And I yelled "hey" again. And the bus didn't stop. So I started yelling and screaming and kicking the door - there was no room to stand in the cargo, I was lying across someone's suitcase. And it stopped and the door opened. I jumped out, put my second suitcase down, looked down the road and saw my first suitcase standing by itself on the side of the road, walked up to the front door of the bus, and Lost. My. Shit. I won't go into details. There was a girl sitting by the driver (actually, she had sat next to me on the plane out of Detroit) and she just kept saying "I'm sorry." I guess it was her job to press the button for the cargo door.

Most of the passengers stood up and gawked out the windows at me. Even if they didn't speak English, they have probably seen enough American movies to get the gist of what I was saying! So, I stuffed my bags in a taxi and went home and stopped shaking about a half hour later. Wheee!

Anyway, back at work, slowly getting over the jet-lag and wonky sleeping patterns (passing out at 9:00pm, waking up 4:30am) and will hopefully be right as rain and a lot less pissed at Freego Bus by next week!

Bridget