I'm back in the USA and if feels pretty nice to be home. I can only take so many fish heads staring up at me from my plate or floating around in my soup before I long for something more 'American' to eat . I've been to Asia more than a half dozen times and it gets easier each time, although the food there can sometimes be scary. In Japan, you must beware of the 'box' lunch. Whenever you see a fine wooden box being served, you just know there's going to be a lot of raw things in it and some that evoke an automatic gag reflex before you even get them in your mouth. Meals in Japan can be like the "eating challenges" on Survivor. China takes the cake, especially if you venture away from the major cities. On several occasions, we visited restaurants with lots of live animals in cages and fish tanks out front. Peacocks, pidgeons, turtles, huge swimming beetles (I kid you not), snakes, and anything that crawled or wiggled was there. Whenever our host saw us look with fascination at any type of critter, he ordered it for us, much to our chagrin. I was actually looking forward to eating a peacock, thinking, naively, that it would be served like pheasant under glass. It looked more like someone chopped it up with a machete. I've never eaten a tougher, grislier bird than that peacock. The snake was tasty but getting the meat off the rib cage was a challenge. Little pigeons decorated the plate with their blackened heads and beaks still intact. The lobster head was in a little boat in the rotating center of the table, still alive with its eyes moving about. We ate the lobster's tail which had been removed and shredded up, but not cooked, while its head observed us in disbelief. It dipped its antennae in our drinks whenever it was spun with the center of the table.

Singapore, like Hong Kong, is much more westernized and so there was plenty of food to choose from wherever we went. I ate Thai, Malaysian, and Indonesian food and it was all pretty good, although somewhat spicy, but I don't mind that at all.

Taiwan has many shades of mainland China since most of its residents can trace their roots back to China so it was back to the fish heads while I was there.

Overall, it was a productive trip with many problems solved and the first trip to Asia where I was traveling by myself. We generally travel in teams of two or three, but in these cost-cutting days, we travel alone and try to wear as many hats as possible.