Welcome to Taiwan!

First impression: Taiwan is full of silly things.


The food at a hot pot restaurant we went to. The colorful panda turned out to be made of some kind of fish


I have been in Taiwan for over a week now and finally have internet access! Needless to say, a lot of things can happen in a week, but I will do my best to sum it up for you. I flew out of Newark late at night on July 30th, stopped in Alaska in the middle of the night, and when we landed in Taipei it was August 1st, so if anything exciting happened on the 31st of July, I missed it. Anyway, there were 6 other Fulbright girls flying out of Newark with me, so we got to hang out in the airport, which was fun. It was a little bit awkward in the beginning because you would spot someone at the gate and think, “there is another young white person (most of the people on the flight were Taiwanese) who is traveling alone and looks like they might be a Fulbright scholar!”, except you would feel weird about just going up to ask them about it. It turned out to be a highly accurate profiling system, though, because I think everybody’s guesses turned out to be correct.

After flying into Taipei, the 4 girls who were going to the Yilan program (in northern Taiwan, closer to Taipei than us) had to go, leaving me, Vicky, and Dani to wander the airport in search of our gate to go to Kaohsiung. Let me tell you, the Taipei airport is hilarious, and it’s even better when it’s 5 in the morning and you’re very loopy. We did a fair amount of wandering before we found our way to the right place, but it was okay because we discovered amazing things in the process. For instance, we spotted this section of the airport with giant pink ice-cream-swirl pillars and huge pictures of Hello Kitty everywhere. I assumed it was a children’s play area, but on closer examination, it was just another gate, so anyone taking the flight to Hong Kong got to wait in the intense pinkness of Hello Kitty World. Even the chairs at the gate were all pink and had Hello Kitty’s face on them. It was aMAZing. Our gate wasn’t nearly so silly, but we did encounter another area on the way there that was an imitation of the Alishan Forest Railway in the mountains of Taiwan, complete with stand-up wooden aboriginal people with the faces cut out so you can pose as aboriginals, which of course we did. (My apologies for the lack of pictures, I will have to get them from one of the other girls later because I didn’t take my own)

Finally we arrived at our gate, where we eventually accumulated 8 Fulbright scholars going to Kaohsiung. The flight was short, but we did have some adventures getting out of the airport. Billy had lost his luggage, and a couple of us got randomly selected to have our luggage inspected at customs. Apparently my luggage was extra suspicious, because I ended up having to open my big bag for them. The guard rifled around through my stuff and fished out several cans of shaving cream, which he proceeded to question me about in Chinese. I told him what it was for, and the guards had a little discussion about it, following which the one guard came back, opened one of the cans, and decided to see what exactly it was by spraying it into the air. I guess he didn’t understand that it’s actually a gel and not a spray, because instead of spraying out into the air, the can just dispensed a big blob of shaving gel, which plopped onto the floor. Words cannot convey how funny this was at the time. I kept my composure until I was away from the guards, and then I cracked up. Traveling for a long time makes you a little bit crazy.
I can’t even think of what we did the first day...not only does it seem like ages ago, but I was really tired at the time and it was a lot of new things at once. I’m fairly sure we took a trip to San Min Elementary, the school that is our home base. We drew slips of paper to see who would be in what apartments, and they took us to our apartments to drop off our luggage and rest a bit. Each apartment has 4 people in it, and the other three in my apartment are Billy, Shiela, and Kate. We all have our own rooms, and we have three bathrooms (Shiela and I share), and there is a common living room and kitchen. It’s a pretty nice apartment (plus there is a convenient 7-11 right outside our gate!). It’s interesting how neatly the apartment drawings turned out. There are 12 of us, 9 girls and 3 guys, and each apartment has one boy. Each apartment also has one person who can speak Chinese well, as well as one person who has never studied Chinese before. It’s kind of amazing how it worked out.

We actually stayed in a hotel for the first night, because we didn’t have bedding or anything in the apartments, but the second day we made a giant trip to Carrefour and Ikea and bought 8 zillion pounds of household items. I guess my memory of our apartment furnishings was quite fuzzy (I had barely spent any time in my room at this point), because I bought a desk and desk chair at Ikea only to come home and find that my room already had a chair. Whoops. But it’s okay, because I like the one I bought a lot better (it’s turquoise!). Getting 12 people’s worth of household furnishings home from Ikea was pretty ridiculous. We bought a really, really large amount of stuff, some of it quite large (a couple people had to get new beds), and it wasn’t even all in bags (they charge for them and we didn’t want to pay), so we basically had to do a lot of assembly-line type lifting to transport everything. We brought it out to the bus in giant Ikea carts, and then a person on the ground would pass it to someone on the stairs who would pass it to someone in the back of the bus who would pack it into a seat, etc. We had to go through the whole process again getting all the stuff off the bus, and then taking it in loads up the elevator to the apartment. It was quite exhausting. After a full day of intense shopping, I spent all evening unpacking and putting together uncooperative furniture until my hands were red and sore from too much screwdriving. Fortunately, we weren’t required to meet for Fulbrighty group activities until rather late the next day. Fulbright is very nice to us :) There have been several nights since I’ve gotten here that I’ve been so tired that I fall asleep somewhere in the evening, fully clothed with all the lights on, and when I wake up it is 1 in the morning and I have to get up and get ready to go to bed for real. I’ve told my roommates that they should poke me into consciousness if they catch me doing it anymore.


















The view off of our apartment balcony


On Sunday we took a ferry to Cijin, which is an island right off the coast of Kaohsiung. We climbed a hill to see the lighthouse (which was closed), and on the way found these random tunnels in the hillside, so we went inside to check them out. It seems that they were old military hideouts? It was pretty adventuresome. Also in Cijin we went to the beach and ate local street food (fish balls, anyone?) and watched this little local music festival or something that was going on near the beach. It was a pretty super day – I would definitely go back.
The rest of this past week has basically been spent getting us set up with various things that we need to live in Taiwan (residency cards, bank accounts), learning about daily life and culture in Taiwan, and starting some teacher training. One day we went out to lunch with a bunch of important people from the Kaohsiung Education Bureau (or something like that) and ate a bunch of amazing food...they just kept bringing out the dishes even after we were all completely stuffed full, and it was all really good. We eat a lot a lot of seafood, which takes a little getting used to, but it’s pretty tasty. Anyway, the best part of the lunch was that we were in a private room because we were a large party, and towards the end of the meal Katie asked one of the important officials why there was a TV and microphones in the room. Before she knew it, they had brought out a book of songs for karaoke and were like, “okay, pick a song to sing!” Hahahaha. And that’s how we ended up having a little karaoke time with important educational officials, featuring American renditions of “Yesterday,” “My Girl,” and the slowest, most hilarious “My Way” ever. It was fabulous. I think the takeaway lesson is to be careful what you ask, because they might make you sing. Also this one time we went to the beach and it was really windy and I got sand in my teeth, but it was okay because there were awesome cutouts where you could pose as tourists. And then they took us to the Dream Mall, which is the largest mall in Taiwan, but I was kind of still all shopped out from the big day of shopping, so I just bought ice cream and wandered through stores looking at silly clothes.

Posing as tourists at the beach

When we are not on field trippy-things, we are usually at San Min, doing various orientation things. There is a professor here with us who’s also here on a Fulbright, and he’s running our teacher training. He’s never taught teachers before, so it’s a learning experience on both ends. We started working with him for real on Friday, when we spent the day talking about lesson plans and how to make them. We made little lesson plans of our own in groups based on a little sample dialogue from a textbook and then we presented them to the group. It was pretty fun, and I think I’m a lot more comfortable with the idea of making lesson plans now, which is good. For the next three weeks we’re going to be doing teacher training all the time during the week. We meet the local English teachers that we’re working with at the beginning of the third week, and then we have a couple of sessions to meet with them before we find out who’s going to be working with whom. School starts September 1st!

Okay, so that obviously doesn’t cover everything, but there was too much for me to think about at once. If you have questions, post them in the comments and I will answer!

P.S. - It turns out I'll be teaching elementary school!