Merry Christmas, all!

Well, here I am, no longer DREAMING of a Green Christmas, but in the middle of one! It's 3:30 in the afternoon on Christmas Day. Randal and I woke up this Christmas morning at 8:30, got up and had showers, then had a leisurely breakfast of fruit salad (fresh bananas, papayas, and pineapple), scrambled eggs on toast (for him) and banana pancakes (for me) on our second-floor guesthouse veranda, overlooking palm trees, a Balinese house courtyard, the pool of our guesthouse and, best of all, the rambutan tree (who knew rambutans grew on trees?) that is so close to our veranda that we can almost pick the rambutans fresh ourselves!

We got here yesterday fairly smoothly. Taipei on Saturday was a bit exhausting and forgettable - we had a bad incident with the shuttle bus guys on our way out of the airport Saturday afternoon, and after the extreme politeness and deference exercised by ALL Japanese people, the Taiwanese seemed quite rude. Sunday morning (Christmas Eve), we had an early morning flight to Bali, and it's been simply magical ever since. I hadn't forgotten how beautiful Bali was, but it's every inch as magical as I remembered, and then some. We had a nice big lunch an hour or so ago, we've done a bit of shopping, and even the giant rainstorm this afternoon was magical (it also helped we were sitting in the open-air-but-covered restaurant at the time, rather than being out in the rain, when it hit).

Anyway, there will be more posts and stories to follow. I am currently sitting in the same Internet cafe that I used two years ago when I was last in Bali, in my pre-blog years when I would send some of you long lengthy mass emails.

Merry Christmas, all, wherever you may be. I am thinking of my family back in Canada - I'd like to say back in the snow and cold, but my understanding is that it's not so cold nor snowy in Toronto right now ... Anyway, have a great day!!!