I checked this morning: everyone I work with is OK from the earthquake. I was pretty sure they would be, but it’s nice to have it confirmed. Still, I’m glad we missed it (since Ted and I are both in the Netherlands at the moment.) The boss mentioned that his power went out – any earthquake that happens down on the south end of the island and is powerful enough to cause outages in Taipei is not one I feel a need to experience in person.
I had a small emergency today: went into my purse to grab some money for lunch and found that my wallet wasn’t there. I’d used it last in paying for dinner last night, so I figured there was a high probability my purse wasn’t closed and it fell out in the hotel room, and a somewhat lower chance I’d somehow left it in the restaurant. Not having credit cards while on travel would be difficult to say the least so I decided it merited a rush trip back to the hotel room. Fortunately it was there; while I was back in the center of town I decided to get passport photos taken, because I need them for my residence permit application. So now I have a bunch of accurate-but-unflattering small photos, but I don’t need to worry about it tonight.
I also picked up lunch while I was back. On my first trip to the Netherlands, I concluded that dinners were great because there were so many different cuisines available, but that Dutch lunches are largely limited to cheese sandwiches or ham-and-cheese sandwiches. In the main I haven’t seen any reason to alter that opinion: OK, if you want junk food you can get croquettes or sausage rolls, and strictly speaking you might also be able to get soup or perhaps a salmon sandwich, but in the main? Cheese or ham-and-cheese. I don’t like ham much, so the choice was obvious. At least they’re often *good* cheese sanwiches – brie on a crisp-crusted baguette in this case, though adding some vegetables other than lettuce shreds would have improved it greatly.