Sunday March 11th 2012.

I wish this blog was just about my incredible days in Taiwan. I wish this blog was about Taiwanese wearing surgical masks wherever you look. I wish this blog was about the Taiwanese watching TV while they work, eat, shop, poop and walk. About how slow they walk, about snakes at the night market, about how impossible it would be to be here without a local person, about wherever the Taiwanese go, they stamp a little book they carry with them, how these stamps are provided everywhere, about how i do it too now, about shops opening at 11am and how before that the staff just stands in front of the shop waiting for the first customer to arrive, about the Taipei Zoo where i saw my first panda, where i took a gondola up 4000 meters to the Maokong tea plantation and visited the tea promotion center 300 meters high, about how I went to Xinbeitou hot springs area with Iris, about the beautiful Beiton thermal valley green sulfur spring we visited, which is 90 degrees Celcius hot, how we walked on silly slippers in the former Japanese hot springs inn, since 1984 the Kayama Taiwan Folk Arts Museum, about my prehistorical hotel room, about the beauty and mystery of Chinese writing and characters, about how every shop around the hotel sells one kind of item like a broom, napkin, glass container, car tire, dust bin and during all this the single person working this shop is watching TV, about how difficult it is to book a guided tour anywhere and when you finally find one you need to fax a confirmation from the nearest 7-eleven fax machine and incredibly enough this is normal to the staff and you drink beer like in a bar in the 7-eleven and they sell boiled swan eggs as snacks, I wish this blog was just about the Shilin night market, where I ate the most amazing fishballs from HongKong, incredible fried chicken from a plastic bag, a sausage in a sausage with sticky rice (need to see that one for yourself) and iced green tea with milk straight from heaven. Thank you Iris for showing me all this..

I wish this blog was about just that. But it isn't. The sad fact is that i am at Taipei Airport, waiting for my flight to HongKong and then Amsterdam. I am going home, I am going home 8 weeks earlier than planned. Family is everything and goes above everything. My dad needs me to come home so I go home. I am going to spend the days with him and my family, the rest will be there later too, he won't be. Thank you friends for calling me already, for showing you care. For me it is the blue colours of KLM greeting me soon to go home. It ends here. I am so sad and so angry against the world and this motherf***ing disease. I wish I had other news but I don't. I am going home, home to Holland. To all the people I met on the way, you have all touched my hearts in more ways than you can ever imagine, to all the cities who have given me hospitality, to all the promises I made but now can't follow up anymore, to all the tears I cried and to all the smiles I shared. To all of this I say goodbye, and I hope to meet you again some day. The adventure lasted 35 in stead of 90 days, but they were 35 incredible days. Now it is time for the most important thing in the world; be with my family in the hardest of the hardest times. I am not looking forward to it but I know that there is not a better place in the world I would rather be right now. Home.

Thank you and see you.