We've been back in Kaohsiung for less than 12 hours and it's been both great and culture shock. The heat and humidity are just like I expected except that I'm not ready for it. Our body clocks are naturally way off so the timing for eating and sleeping are a bit of a bother. The kitchen was completely devoid of anything to eat except for some granola bars and the fruit our cleaning lady, Elyzia, left for us.

Elyzia is one of the high points of our return. The apartment was sparkling clean, the bills were paid and there were mangoes on the kitchen table. She iron, folded and organized all our clothes too. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I hadn't figured out where I was going to put all my things before we left for the summer and now I'm having to find things like my t-shirts based on Elyzia's organizational style. It's a bit odd having ironed t-shirts too. She organized the tupperware too, but that always needs organizing.

Back to the culture shock. We went out for lunch at a western-style brunch-all-day place. We wanted to eat someplace that was familiar and where we didn't have to decipher the menu. After all, by then we'd been travelling for over 24 hours and our brains were fried. That was fine. Then we went to the 24-hour fruit stand that we pass on our way to work and that was better than fine.

Mangoes, pineapple, bananas, Asian pear and passion fruit. The watermelon looked really good but we had more shopping to do so we needed to save some space on the bikes.

The next stop was more of the culture shock part of the day. We wanted to go simple for dinner and have rice and beans but we couldn't find any cans of beans. There were plenty of cans of things but who knows what's inside when you can't read the labels. Plan B was to have tofu with the rice so off to the refrigerator section I went. Again, all those packages with Chinese labels. There are about a dozen choices of tofu and no way to tell how they're different from one another. No problem, we'll just buy a couple different kinds and besides, I found a package of cooked beans sitting next to the tofu section.

Come dinner time, I open the package and discover that these are loaded with sugar. I imagine someone might serve them on top of shaved ice or use them as a filling for a cake (the Taiwanese love their sweet red beans). So back to Plan B, the tofu, except that the package I open is silky tofu and not really suitable for the stir fry I had planned. By then I'm too weary to care so we had not-quite-cooked-enough rice with a slurry of peanut, soy sauce and tofu. Oh, and I cut up one of the mangoes that Elyzia left for us except that it turned out to be a papaya instead and Lee doesn't like papaya.

Tomorrow we'll do a real shopping trip and stock the larder, we'll have had a night's sleep in our very own bed, and everything will be a little easier. Except that it will still be very hot and humid. Welcome home.