I arrived in Taiwan last Friday morning and it is now Tuesday night. So it has not yet been a full week.
My initial impressions were that Taiwan doesn't feel totally different. The vegetation around the highway looked a lot like upstate New York. To tell the truth I was a bit disappointed. This was as I was being driven from the airport in Taipei to my new school in Fengyuan, Taichung. We soon passed by a place selling gigantic Buddha statues. I mean like house sized Buddhas and not just one or two, a bunch of them. Okay, so I'm in Asia and it's different, I felt a bit better.
The driver and his girlfriend both spoke very little English, which was nice for me. I really feel like I will need to work on my Chinese a lot while I'm here and so I want to sort of avoid English speakers for a while. Although I could understand almost nothing of what the driver was saying, I understood his girlfriend fairly well and we had a nice couple of conversations on the 1.5 hour ride.
As we entered Fengyuan, my new home city, we drove by a Betel nut girl. I thought this girl looked like a 12 year old and was actually turned off by what should've been a "betel nut beauty," but this was when the driver pointed her out to me and showed me that he had a box of betel nuts bought from a similar location. I had suspected that he had been eating these things and that's why I couldn't understand anything he was saying. For those of you that don't know I would liken betel nuts to chewing tobacco.
Upon my first arrival at the school I now live at I was brought to my room, on the third floor of the school... not what I had expected. I was taken back, thinking, "this is really not what I had expected, although I'm not sure what's wrong with it, but... I kept an open mind and wasn't expecting anything so how is this not what I was expecting and then it's hot in here and it's only 8 am...." Then my boss came by and introduced himself explaining all the details of the room, the air conditioner. He told me to unpack for a while and then we'd be going out to breakfast, the first step in a rather long list of things he had planned for me. His goal, which thankfully coincided with mine, was to keep me busy the entire day so that I could fight the 12 hour time difference I would be experiencing. Lucky for me I had mentally prepared for this and even tried to adjust myself before coming here on my own.
He took me out on his scooter. This has to be the most outrageous thing about this city, no sidewalks, less pedestrians and cars, and tons and tons of scooters driving like mad throughout the city. I've been told there are laws, but they are not followed. We spend the majority of the time driving on the right side of the road but, even in the presence of a double yellow line, I often find us riding on the left side, racing in and out of traffic, while my boss says something like, this is technically illegal, driving here takes some getting used to.
Not only that, there are no sidewalks, with few exceptions. So the few pedestrians, namely me, have to walk on the road filled with these lunatic scooter drivers. It's insane, and it's pretty stupid. The lack of traffic laws here is ridiculous, they need to enforce some things and reform this system. I mean it is a city after all, there is a lot of traffic downtown.
Another thing, at the red light, there will be a pile of scooters. We will drive to the front! Scooters get in front of the stop line, way in front, and then tend to jockey for position for when the light turns green. This is absolutely insane.
It gets worse, there are typically two or three scooters that actually go through the intersection before the light turns green, you hear them rev up there engines and they are long gone when the light changes colors. but in some ways this is encouraged because some of the red lights actually have a countdown to let you know they will be changing. To make this even more dangerous people don't actually stop when the light first turns red. It's more like a yellow light that means, "stop soon" or "pretty soon you will have to stop." There's a rather large delay between the time the light ticks red and the last scooter drives through it. Meanwhile the other scooters may have all ready started driving by.
Now I can understand why there are stereotypes in the US saying that Asians can't drive.
What else to say? I keep finding my opinion on life here fluctuating, from loving it to wondering why I'm here. The traffic is crazy but for some reason it has a type of appeal to me. The people are so nice to me, as a foreigner. If I speak Chinese or show the slightest bit of understanding they are surprised and complement me on my Chinese. Compared to the US where foreigners are more expected to speak English.
But then I think, I'm going to work as a teacher, I am an engineer... I should be doing a more serious job, something more mentally challenging. Of course my goal here isn't simply to teach or start a teaching career, I need to develop my Chinese and really take advantage of life here. Then more valuable opportunities will present themselves.
I've gotten myself lost in the city as well. I'm also finding it really hard to go out, it's embarrassing to not understand the language and I'm currently a bit timid about going to a restaurant and not knowing what to order. I'll need to overcome these fears pretty quickly. It's easy with a guide, but I need to do these things myself, after all, being immersed in the language is a huge motivation for my coming here.
I wonder if I'll find a good place to study Kung Fu, or if it will be hard to find a good place to run around here?
I have some preparatory work and some training for teaching that have kept me busy so far. I wont' actually start teaching until next week so I have some more time to get settled.
