yi yang

my life has been totally transformed; i was paired with my co-teacher, i moved in to a new apartment with new roommates, and i burned my mouth tonight on pork sausage/eggroll/dogpoops at a beergardenstlye restaurant in luodong. also, in less than two hours i'll be a pallindromic age for only the second time in my life. it all started on wednesday, or long before, when the pairings for teachers were announced. each of the 12 fulbrighters had to list their top six choices for local teachers, and the 12 local teachers did the same for fulbrighters. that pairing strategy still had some holes, so everyone had to rank all 12. then, the final pairings were announced in front of everyone and somehow i came out with sue b. as my partner, who hasn't exactly been my top choice for working with. i won't go into it all here, but suffice it so say i was pretty surprised. right afterwards, we drew papers to see who would live where, and i'm living with joel, julian, and andrea on the top floor of a big new apartment building in yilan city, from which you can see the mountains and turtle island, a mystical vision on the horizon i WILL go to someday soon. it is a last animalian stronghold between my line of sight and the mighty pacific; great peace, after all, needs a buffer in order to appear to a humble soul like me. friday we moved into our new places, and thanks to joel switching everything while i was gone, i got the big room with the balcony...i also bought a scooter on friday, a white yamaha "turword" model that's kind of old but has good steering and tight acceleration controls, which i like. i got my drivers license on thursday, making me one of the licensed, helmeted ranks of scooter drivers in the country with the world's largest scooter population per person. here are some new pictures from the roof of my new apartment, where i plan to spend a lot of time over the next 10 months.

time to get serious about blogs (or is it?)

maybe i should use my blog better. here goes. sorry for repeat info.

i'm about to start the final week of orientation, which is
something i've been looking forward to since day one. the past few
weeks certainly haven't been a waste, and things have been getting
better since luke, gina, and i had a meeting with dr. collins (a
professor of eductation who is here on his own fulbright, a part of
which is to lead the orientation and have biweekly meetings with the
teaching staff) last sunday to discuss some issues a lot of us have
been having with the training. we had been doing a lot of activities
geared towards elementary school kids designed to get us used to
dealing with kids and to help us learn teaching strategies, but there
seemed to be a lot of wasted time and nobody really felt like there
was adequate communication about why certain things were happening.
dr. collins was really receptive to our concerns and so things have
gotten considerably better without sacrificing content, and a lot of
other factors were explained to us during this talk that could have
been presented earlier to save a lot of confusion and frustration from
both sides...one thing, though, is that taiwanese society is
excruciatingly centered on saving face, which means that being direct
about anything makes things really bad really quickly for both speaker
and recipient. an example: tonight joel and i went to our new
favorite noodle place around the corner (discovered by me on one of my
frequent bike rides around the neighborhood...the food is great and
the place is clean and the staff [a family, as is usual here] is
really friendly and nice and eager to give out free stuff to us)...we
ordered two noodle bowls and some dumplings, and the girl brought one
bowl of noodles and the dumplings and was talking with us, and after a
while joel inquired about his noodles, and she explained that she
hadn't realized he wanted some too and got them right away. after
that, though, she stopped talking with us and spent the rest of the
meal at the counter outside until we asked for the bill and got her to
talk again and gave her her face back. it's really bizarre and severe
the way even meaningless things work this way, and so our comments
about the orientation were, apparently, quite an issue behind the
scenes, though dr. collins is american and was very understanding. i
think things have smoothed over, but it's irritating and feels like
everyone here is stuck in 7th grade sometimes. but, it's a cultural
thing and, like anywhere you go, things work better if you learn how
to play the game like the locals play it.

i just got back from spending the weekend in taipei...i took the train
(1.5 hours on the express train) on saturday morning with joel and
zach, and we eventually met up with gina, sienna, luke, and julian,
who came up a bit later. we all stayed at the same hotel we did when
we first arrived in taiwan, which is a favorite of the foundation for
scholarly exchange (our sponsoring organization in taiwan)...the hotel
jade garden, it's a nice place in a good location and we get a
discount on the already low price if we mention our connection to the
foundation. anyway, the group of us headed pretty much straight for
taipei 101, the tallest building in the world, and after lunching at
the gigantic food court (everything from subway to sizzling taiwanese
steak on iron platters) we went to the top. there's a glassed-in
observation deck at 89 floors, and if you pay an extra NT$100 ($3US)
you can go to the outside platform on the 91st floor. levi, who had
gone to taipei the night before (and who went to ball state, grandma)
by himself, julian, gina, and i were the only ones to go up, and it
was really worth it. you can feel the building move in the wind, but
instead of being terrifying it was peaceful, and we stayed up there
for almost an hour and only saw 5 other people (the 89th floor had big
crowds). i think it's also worth mentioning that i took a poo in the
91st floor bathroom, meaning that it was on the highest public floor
of the tallest building in the world, which has to count for
something. after that, levi, julian, gina, and i spend the afternoon
in the mall/bookshop on the lower floors of 101 and then went to
longshan temple, which is a famous spot in the city. i burned some
incense to guanyin, buddhist goddess of mercy, and then a woman gave
me a sweet bun. not sure whether it was to eat or to use as an
offering, i asked her in chinese what it was, and she said it was for
eating. before i knew it, she and another woman had stuffed a whole
bag full of these buns into my hands and sent me on my way, so i left
longshan with 12 more baozi (steamed buns) than i came in with. i
guess sometimes religion yields immediately tangible results...i
wandered around saturday night with levi, who i hadn't really talked
with much before. he's a really nice, cool guy, and i think he and i
have a lot in common, so it was good to make that connection. sunday
morning i got up bright and early and met luke and gina at 8 am to
visit the national palace museum, home of the largest collection of
chinese art and artifacts in the world (which the nationalist party
stole from beijing when they were forced out in 1949, attempting to
convince the world that if they possessed the cultural history of
china, then they must be the real china, not the communists). we got
there about at opening and enjoyed maybe 10 pleasant minutes before
the japanese tour groups rolled in...we battled for the rest of the
morning to see jade, bronzes, and pottery that was all really nice,
but because there's some renovation going on we didn't get to see any
painting, which i was disappointed about. the museum was 1/7 the
price of seeing the top of taipei 101, and i plan on coming back
frequently, since even without renovation they change their exhibits
every 3 months. after that, the three of us went to lunch at a nice
place near the main train station where we'd arranged to meet everyone
for a 2:30 train back to ilan city. at 1:45, gina remembered that
she'd left some of her stuff at the hotel and rushed off to get it,
and at 2:25 luke, zach, and myself were still waiting for her at the
ticket counter. we all have taiwanese cell phones, so contact is
easy, but they don't work for holding trains, and as gina finally ran
up we all took off toward the platform, barely leaping on the train
before the doors closed. we frantically shoved through the crowd to
find our seats, and gina found someone sitting in hers; when she
showed him the ticket, he said, "this isn't your train." we reversed
our frantic dash to the door and leapt onto the platform just as the
train pulled out, only to discover that 2 trains, on the same line but
going in opposite directions, were leaving at exactly the same time,
and by sheer bad luck we'd hopped on the wrong one. it pays to be
white here (and many places, i guess), because we yelled out and the
conductor shouted something about waiguoren (foreigners) into his
walkie talkie and the doors of our real train paused for the extra
three seconds it took for us to leap on board. i spent the next 2
hours standing since the train was full, but at least we made it home.
not my first close call, but they're always exciting. and not my last. onward.

sure thing, yao ming

i just got back from taipei. taipei for the weekend. during this weekend, i took a crap on the top public floor of the tallest building in the world, which must signify something big. the obeservation deck of taipei 101, as the phallic beast is called, whistles with the frequency of the winds of the whole world. i also went to the snakehandler night market, which was the same thing as ilan or lodong but with more snakes and more stalls...i also went with luke and gina to the national palace museum, which is one of the central arguments for taiwan as the true home of chinese culture. it didn't convert me, but it was cool to see. i hung out with levi at the brass monkey in the financial district and watched world cup heroes get paid to score for different colored jerseys while drinking english beer, which is the kind of experience i've had a few times before in asia and which i'm always ambivalent about, but the company was good. zach, luke, gina, and i met at the train station to go home at the very nick of time, making the most of things as usual. at longshan temple, i prayed with incense and when a lady gave me some bread i asked her what it was for (offering or edible) and she said you eat it, here, take more, and before i knew it she had given me a huge bag of sweet buns for buddha, or someone...mmmm, nirvana.

oh blog

the last pictures were from taipei...here are some from ilan city

questions, chinese answers

okay, so last time i posted the directions were in chinese, so i made a subheading paragraph instead of making a post...i spent the weekend at the hotsprings in jiaosi and the beach in fulong, which was not bad as far as weekends go. i also bought a guitar and a bike, both at stores very near my apartment...the feeling of freedom that comes with having a bike in a strange place is totally transforming: i feel like for the first time since i've been here i'm able to move, explore, and discover under my own power, which is something that's very important to me. and yesterday i ate frozen duck blood, which is like smooth tofu that just manages to retain its former identity as a liquid coursing through the veins of taiwanese ducks. delish.

computers can talk to each other?

yes, i suppose they can. now i have a blog.