Ahhhh, home again. How nice!

Mmmm, how lovely it is to be home. I'm jet-lagged to high heaven, wrecked from the yacky 25 hour-door-to-door journey and haven't got my land legs back yet, but I'm happy to be home. Whilst typing this, I'm also in the process of making the first meal I've made (other than putting together a few fruit salads) since Sunday 23 March! As the taxi driver on the way home from the aiport rightly said yesterday morning - I won't be wanting any Chinese food for a while!!!

So, here are some more photos that I took a day or so before leaving Taiwan which, while of nothing special, give some more idea of what city life is like over there (and also why it's nice to be back in quiet and relatively well spaced out northern England!). The bottom floor (ground floor for Europeans, 1st floor for others) is usually a shop of some sort. Often above that are a few floors of offices and other businesses, (training places, hairdressers etc), then come several floors of homes.

<-This is an art shop. It hasn't come out as well as I'd hoped as I really wanted to convey the crampedness of many Taiwanese shops. From the guy standing there, you get an idea of the width of the whole enterprise and you can just see the displays either side of the narrow passage from the door. There's more behind each display!!

Onto stitching topics and here's all I managed to do on the Goldfinches during the journey over to Taiwan:

Rotten photo taken in bad light in our room over there. Taiwanese apartments can be so dark as everything is so cramped together!










I think I did another 3 or 4 sessions on it whilst there and this is the current status as I did nothing stitch-wise on the way back. I just felt ugh from start to finish and watched 1½ in-flight movies and tried to get some sleep instead!! Last night whilst not letting myself go to bed too early, (although I think I could have gone anytime from 8pm really, we went about 9.30pm), I put in the top-stitching on the Blue-tits and am looking forward to getting them finally done. They've got 2 marks on them thanks to having been in progress and not well looked after for at least 9 months now, so I will need to wash that one before it can be framed.

This is some of the stash I bought whilst out there. Here you can see a large piece of light green satin fabric, (much larger than you can see here, it's folded several times), which I paid only NT$45 for (about 75p or US$1.50) and more than a dozen Taiwanese made embroidery ribbons. All but one are 5mm width (the other is a 7mm one) and they are made of nylon, not silk, but I think they're lovely and should wash and last well. They were NTS70 each (the 7mm one being NT$90), which is only about £1.20. You have to pay about £3 for most things of ribbon here and I thought they would be nice as trimmings on the bags I plan to make. I'll showcase all the fabrics I got for those when they come - we sent them back sea mail last Friday or so, so they won't be here until late May at the earliest.=(

This is the shop I bought the ribbons at, which was a 15 minute walk from where we were staying. It's a quilting shop really, who also sell sewing machines and a few other things and run quilting classes etc. One of the ladies there helped me to learn the Chinese for various needlcrafts!!=)

Here are the Chinese nick-nacks I brought back for a few friends and colleagues. Most of my friends have got so many Chinese things that I didn't think it was worth getting loads for everyone, but I did promise things to one or two and also to former Language Centre colleagues as Chinese things are more of a novelty to them.=)