WHAT DOES IGNACIO THINK ABOUT THE WHOLE THING?

A colleague of Mike gave Ignacio this dog, Sheppy, who used to belong to his now young adults kids.

Ignacio is having a good time, like any 3-year-old who is well fed and loved does! He is going to a bilingual school, called Ivy League. I stayed with him the first week and then just dropped him off. To my surprise, he never cried! I leave him only 3 hours and take him home for lunch and nap. I will start leaving him there longer in the coming weeks. He spends, therefore, a good amount of time with “mami” and sees Mike in the early morning and late afternoon. I’m glad we are spending a lot of time together, as that has been the plan all along, to spend lots of time with mom and dad until he is 5. After all, he will have almost two decades of full time schooling (and much less of mom and dad) ahead of him! Iggy is always talking about going to Kansas City and St. Louis (the only places we used to visit when we lived in Wichita). I translate this as to: “let’s go on to the next thing”, “let’s get out of here”, “let’s take a vacation”, “I miss my routine”, “I want to see people I know”. He is also more talkative, and trying to make sense of the things we tell him. For example, I told him “Those Chinese ladies are looking at you and giggling because you don’t look Chinese” and Ignacio responded, “Sí, mami, I’m Spanish”. Another day I said, “I run out of the children suppositories, I will have to buy the Chinese version, if needed”, and he said “No, mami, I want Irish supositorios”. As you can see, his sentences usually have English and Spanish and he is trying to make sense of all these nationalities and languages: American, Irish, Uruguayan, English, Spanish, Chinese…it’s quite complicated!

What are Ignacio’s highlights of our life in Taiwan?

• Going to the playground and to the university pool
• “Pine Cone”: a little café on campus which actually has nothing worth having, but it’s at a nice open-air location, with a slide and water misters to keep its clients alive.
• “Main gate”: the main gate to campus, with some nice landscape on a very steep hill that every time I climb it pushing the stroller I feel less guilty of having had a big sweet bread roll.
• Riding the bus, the train and the taxi.
• Seeing and hearing the garbage truck every night
• Seeing a Starbucks or a McDonald! (or even better, going inside one of those :)