WOW! FROG EGGS?!

I have to write this post sometime or another. So here goes.

This summer, I was in Taiwan on a Taiwanese government program for four weeks called Assisting Individuals with Disadvantages. We taught English to kids for two weeks; the first week, we were being “trained” to do the job, and the last week we went on a tour of Taiwan. It was amazing, really. My teaching group, eight of us, formed a pretty awesome group of friends. My roommates from the training week were also cool. The students I taught were a lot of fun, and we were close enough for me to cry a little bit at the closing ceremony—one of my students had written a speech in English and read it aloud to an extremely appropriate piano playing in the background. And even in the final week, I got to know some sugoi people pretty well, thanks to the KPop song Tell Me by the Wonder Girls (long story? not really, but maybe I don’t feel like explaining it, haha).

I miss a lot of random things about Taiwan. For example—everybody has and will continue to mention this, but it’s true—7-Eleven is awesome there. At Seven (what people call it there), you can buy any type of drink—bottled milk tea, various kinds of bottled teas, Supau, Japanese drinks like Pocari, even various kinds of… alcohol—as well as onigiri, good instant noodles, and other random good stuff. Don’t forget they always have air conditioning, too. Seven is so much of an oasis in Taiwan that we even tried (yes, tried) to walk there in a typhoon. Not kidding.

Things are cheap in Taiwan. Of course, this is an American’s point of view because the standard of living doesn’t require as much money over there (and there’s no minimum wage). I miss paying less than a dollar for a large cup of bubbletea. My students were shocked to hear that I paid about 300 NT ($3 USD) at home… Food in general is extremely cheap (and really good); $3 for a decent, cooked, meal, anyone? And note that this $3 meal isn’t simply three fast food items off the dollar menu at Wendy’s. Even clothes, for once, are cheap there. You can buy decent fobby/Asian-trendy shirts for, say, $10-15 there. Or less. So I actually bought a few clothes there.

The humid weather deserves a mention. Yes, it’s hot in Taiwan, but I don’t think it’s really noticeably worse than Houston. Different from Dallas, yes, but that’s to be expected. And it’s not that I like that type of weather, but it’s definitely manageable.

In general, it was a lot of fun being put right into the culture. In Hualien, it was always funny seeing a street big enough for one car, with a car going through, then a car trying to get through from the other side, causing one to reverse a little bit, all the while motor scooters and maybe random bikes try to squeeze through. Hualien City itself has exactly one McDonald’s, one Starbucks, and one KFC, I believe, and this allows it to be considered a big enough city. One of each of those may not sound like much, but there are many, many random tea stands and a good number of tasty ice places… as well as a manga rental shop (a Blockbuster for manga, I guess) maybe here and there.

I miss Taiwan, all the people I met there, my relatives, too, that I don’t get to see very often. It’s all a part of my heritage, like Hong Kong.

Greetings from Hualien, Taiwan, where I’m teaching English to kids! I hadn’t been to Taiwan in eleven years or so.

It’s been pretty good so far. I’ve made some good friends as well as seen an old friend. And, actually, it could be a little better, but it’s still awesome nonetheless.

I’ve forgotten about blogging this until now, but it’s better late than never (sometimes, at least).

Anyway, this past summer in Hong Kong a random piece of relatively unique graffiti caught my eyes. It was a treble clef on some wall in Causeway Bay. And it wasn’t just a treble clef either, it had a sharp accidental along the tail of the clef. Well, whether or not that little accidental is special is really up to you. But in any case, it was a simple but interesting work of art, an especially fresh breath of air—a couple of ubiquitous musical symbols not typically present on urban streets. Usually you don’t see cool graffiti like this, even in a place with a lot more graffiti, like Rome.