Today Katherine, Vince and I took a bus into Taipei, very quick and easy. We got to Taipei at about 11 and took a cab to the Sunshine kitchen, where we met a grant recipient that Katherine had met in New York. We had a wonderful lunch of noodles. I was expecting a tour of their facilities and perhaps the people they were serving (the elderly, the unemployed, etc…), but instead we got a wonderful tour of Nei-hu, a suburb of Taipei in a rented bus with the whole staff of Sunshine Kitchen. It is quite calm compared to downtown Hsinchu, full of Home Depot-type stores and Costos. We saw a bunch of streams and walking trails that they are renovating. We also went to the hilltop villa of a writer who had written a rather large picture book on the history of Nei-hu. His house had a little tea shop on the top and we sat around and drank wonderful aromatic tea and had him autograph a copy of the book. The air and the scenery from his villa was wonderfully. Taiwan is really quite beautiful once you lift the layer of pollution which drapes many of the major cities. On the way home, we took the Flying Dog bus company, Vince was very unhappy about the whole situation. a little boy’s mother saw how much we had been struggling with the V-man, that she handed back a McDonald’s toy to try and calm him down. It didn’t work too well.