Some Updates and a few Downdates

Well during my last entry I was really wracking my brain to come up with complaints about Taiwan.  But since writing it, a few more important ones came to my attention.  So, welcome to, Complaints! pt II.

1.  Lack of Clothes Dryers.  Okay, so they do actually have clothes dryers in our dorms.  But when Afore was showing me around on the first day, and she showed me the washing machines, she acted like I was crazy when I asked about dryers.  "Well, you don't really need them..." she said, "since our washers have spin cycles."  I was shocked.  Our washers have spin cycles too.  But anyway, she showed me the dryers but I could see judgment in her eyes.  So, when it came time to do my laundry, I decided to do it the Taiwan way and hang-dry everything.  Of course it was raining (of course), so instead of hanging my things in the airy outdoor area, I brought them back to my dorm room, cleared out my closet, and put as much as I could on hangers, spacing them out for maximum airflow.  Two days later my pants and socks were just starting to get dry, and they were all stiff and inconvenient and some even started getting a musty smell.  I don't care how high maintenance Afore thinks I am, I will definitely be using the dryer in the future.

2.  Lack of Netflix.  I only discovered this a few days ago, but it was an unexpected, and frankly, tragic realization.  Netflix online streaming doesn't work outside the US!  And neither does Hulu!  What is wrong with this country!!!!! :(  :(  :(

3.  The Quality of my New Purse.  After being in the market for a new purse/bag for a while, I deliberated extensively and eventually settled on one that seemed perhaps to fill all my requirements.  It was soft and leathery and big enough for my nalgene (plus maybe a light sweater or something), but not too big, and I liked the look of it.  Well, within 24 hours of buying it (for about $10US - cheap, I know), it started to fall apart!  The leathery outside has been flaking off in all the corners, gradually revealing the cloth beneath it.  And so now it looks like an old, beat-up, falling-apart bag, and I've had it for less than a week.  But I'm sure not in the mood to buy another one to replace it!  Grrr.

In more exciting news, in the past four days, three of them have been sunny!  It sure feels like we earned this.  Thursday's weather was absolutely beautiful - sunny, warm, and clear.  Friday was pretty nice too, and today was just about ideal.  Even yesterday it only started sprinkling in the evening.  So that's good, and has provided opportunities to do things outside of my dorm room.

Thursday - Beautiful campus!  Taken from the cafeteria

Ashley and me enjoying Thursday's weather over lunch

One morning last week, Ashley and I went to get breakfast at a little restaurant near campus.  This was such a perfect moment of a language barrier at work.  Ashley, whose Chinese is way above mine, was ordering breakfast (dan bing - the really delicious thing we had with our first breakfast, like an omelet wrapped in dough and fried) for us.  I was indicating I wanted the same thing by holding up two fingers.  When it came time to pay, I was surprised to find that I was charged more than Ashley.  I suspected maybe this was a tax for non-Chinese speakers.  Once she handed us the bag, however, the true reason became clear.  We were given three orders - one for Ashley, and two for me.  She thought when I had two fingers up that I wanted two breakfasts!  Alas.  I ate one for breakfast and one for lunch (consecutively), and luckily, they were really good.

On Thursday I started doing calligraphy in my Chinese class with April.  What looks like such a calm and tranquil art turned out to be my most stressful lesson yet.  April reassured me that it just takes practice, but I am not sure I am really built to be a calligrapher.  Even writing the character 一, which I mistakenly thought to be just a line, turned out to be difficult and anxiety-inducing.

Much of Thursday was spent quietly enjoying the campus and the outdoors, and studying my new characters.  I then also started reading Mockingjay, the third book in the Hunger Games series.  It was all relaxing and peaceful up until...

Karaoke!  Thursday night (rates go up on weekends, of course) was my first true karaoke bar experience.  We left for Holiday KTV at 10:30 and had the room booked until 6 am.  "Of course," I said to myself, "no one is dreaming of staying anywhere near as late as 6!  Right?"  Well, I being the only one in attendance who had class the next day (damn these intensive Chinese program students who still haven't started classes!) figured I would be out of there by 2:30, at the latest.  Well, after hours of singing both Chinese and American songs (including classics by Smashmouth, the Backstreet Boys, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Blink 182, S.H.E., and so many more) and enjoying the all-you-can-eat buffet, we eventually started heading out around 3:45, but with the hassle of paying the right amount, discussing future plans, walking back to campus, and then schlepping up the mountain, I didn't get to bed until just after 5!  I never do that!  Two and a half hours later, I woke up and got ready to meet for my 8:30 field trip.  Ouch.

Becca and I are excellent singers

For the fieldtrip we (Ashley, Rebecca, April, and Xinhui) went to Gugong - the National Palace Museum.  It is a beautiful museum that contains hundreds of thousands important and ancient Chinese artifacts dating back to the Neolithic age that the Nationalist party stole and brought to Taiwan (or something like that).  And with just one can of coffee in me, it was still really really neat.  We had an English guided tour and the tour guide was amazing - clearly very knowledgeable and passionate about the contents of the museum.  We saw bronzeware, jade, calligraphy, paintings, and a whole lot of other stuff that I hardly remember.  According to our tour guide, we got to see both the most "important" (a bronze cauldron with hundreds of characters engraved on it, which makes it really good for studying the development of the language) and "popular" (the jade cabbage - I am not exactly sure why this was as popular as it is, but it was very nice) pieces in the museum.  To me, there were a few pieces that were especially interesting.  One was an ivory carving of not two - not three- but seventeen concentric spheres, all intricately carved from one piece of ivory!  It was incredible.  The tour guide tried to explain how it was made, but all I really got was that they are pointy on one end and carved from the outside in.  It was truly amazing.  Another favorite was these portable boxes that emperors would basically use to bring their favorite trinkets around - as in, Emperor toy boxes.  They had little compartments for their best little jade, ivory, or wooden carvings.  The boxes then could fold in various ways to either display the pieces two-dimensionally, three-dimensionally, or carry them compactly.  It was like nothing I had seen at any museums in the US.  Anyway, the museum was a lot of fun and we went to an adorable and beautiful park afterwards.

Ivory Spheres - photo courtesy of internet

Ashley, me, and Rebecca in front of museum

Straight from that area, Rebecca and I joined some more of the gang to go on the gondola up the mountain to Maokong.  The gondola ride was stunning - mountains and trees in every direction, as well as a great view of most of Taipei.  Maokong is known for its tea plantations and is full of very traditional-style tea shops.  We stopped in one and had an extremely pleasant open-air pot of tea with a great view and a whole traditional ritual surrounding the way the tea is served, including pouring water over the outside of the teapot, and dumping out the first two cups of tea that are only to prepare the cups.  It was beautiful, peaceful, and tasty.  The sun set as we sat there, so our gondola ride home was a dramatically different but still striking view of darkness and city lights.

Gondola!  This is one out of the 45 pictures I took during the 20 minute ride.

Crystal bottom for enhanced experience

Our view during tea

We then went directly to meet up with some more of the gang at Shilin night market.  This is one of the biggest ones in Taipei, and it was really amazing!  It stretched on and on in every direction with typical night market food (fried chicken, candied tomatoes (which I tried last week - did I mention?  Quite good!), oyster omelets, giant sausages on sticks, dumplings, steamed buns stuffed with meat, stinky tofu, fried milk, boba tea, oh, and so much more!) as well as carnival-type games with giant stuffed prizes, and stores, stalls, and carts selling bags, watches, socks, hair adornments, shoes, wallets, clothes, and really anything.  It was a remarkable place, and I exercised perhaps even more remarkable self-restraint by buying nothing except a reasonable dinner.

Amazing bags at Shilin Nigh Market

My trip to Shilin night market was strongly marked by a milestone event of the trip: my first bad mood!  Of course, after getting only two and a half hours of sleep and then having one of the busiest days of the trip, it's frankly impressive that I was not only still alive but not actively throwing a tantrum.  And it's kind of exciting, you know?  Two and a half weeks in is a pretty good run to go without a moment of crankiness.  Now it's like this place has become home enough to experience a full range of emotions.  And even in the heat of my grouchy mood, I could appreciate that this was only highlighting how good my moods have been since getting here.  So really it was all for the best.

We left Shilin Night Market just in time to get the last bus home at midnight.  All through the day people were commenting on how they couldn't believe I was still awake and kicking, but I actually felt pretty much fine.  In fact, when we got back on campus and the bottom-of-the-mountain crew went to their dorm, Gene and I (the top-of-the-mountainers) started to head back, only to hear a group of students having fun on the porch of the administration building.  We agreed to check it out, and it turned out to be about 10 students from the European Languages department who had just gotten out of basketball practice for their team.  They invited us to join them for a while, and they were all incredibly inviting and sweet and spoke amazingly good English.  They told us a scary story which honestly might give me nightmares, but still helped lift my mood.  We made small talk for 45 minutes or so before I confessed to Gene that I was in desperate need of sleep and we headed back up the mountain.  They promised to find us on facebook (the main way of communication in this town), but I haven't heard anything from them yet... perhaps we will just have to surprise them at their next basketball game!

Saturday I slept in (considerably) and spent a relaxed day around the dorm writing my long-overdue newsletter article for CIEE that we were supposed to turn in at the end of orientation.  It was a good day to recover from my overly exciting and expensive Friday.

One thing I don't think I have mentioned yet (but may have contributed to my low-key Saturday) is my current state of technological isolation.  Earlier last week my Taiwan phone unexpectedly stopped receiving text messages, our main method of communication.  Within 24 hours of that happening, the internet in my room stopped working (perhaps a problem with my ethernet cord?  My roommate's internet is fine, and my computer's wifi works in the wifi-able lobby of my dorm, which is, of course where I am in order to post this).  My dorm room has never had good cell phone reception and apparently people have attempted calling me and it hasn't gone through, so really, I am basically unreachable.  I did get a free iPhone app that allows free texting to the US when I have a wifi connection, but it has not yet shown any success in reaching Taiwanese cell phones... Alas.  I know many of these problems are fixable and I promise I really will get them checked out.  In the meantime, I may get a lesson in survival without people to order my food for me.

Today, Sunday, was another perfectly beautiful day!  And actually, it was almost a perfect day overall.  A group of us met for lunch and a trip to the Taipei zoo, which is pretty close to the school.  We often take the bus to the Taipei zoo stop because there is a subway entrance there, but this time we actually walked instead, and it was a lovely walk on a lovely day.  When we got there, we paid just $1 US to enter (student price! yeah!) and found it swarming with adorable Taiwanese children.  It actually seems like a pretty nice zoo, and we got to see the standard zoo animals (including an orangutan, which Rebecca joked, was "the first other natural redhead we've seen") plus some I had never heard of or seen before (including one animal that looked like a little midget deer but that Avalon claims is closely related to the whale), and two giant pandas that I am still convinced were stuffed animal replicas of the real thing.  It was a perfect day for the zoo and a very nice time.  I didn't take any pictures, so just google things like "giraffe" or "monkey" and pretend that I posted those here.

After the zoo we went for a hike!  The path went up from campus all the way to Maokong, and we took a side route for a while to get to a waterfall that we never reached because it was getting dark and the path in that area was totally dangerous and scary.  One wrong step and any of us could have been a goner.  It was an invigorating hike with lots of stairs, a temple along the way, tea plantations, mountains everywhere, trees with leaves like feathers, and so much good looking scenery that I tried to commit every step to memory.  And sometimes to the memory of my iPhone, as shown.

:O

After hours of steep hiking we ended up at a semi-upscale restaurant in the open air with a gorgeous mountainside view of Taipei and we each had a hard earned dinner of a personal pizza and a cocktail.  We lingered after dinner talking at the table and it was a great time to be outside, in that place, with those people.  We took the bus back down to campus and Ginny, Rebecca, and I finished the night with Mulan.  I then walked up the mountain accompanied by Cat Stevens and returned to my room.  Today was a great day.  And many more to come!

Goodnight!