The day started bright and early at 8 o’clock rolling out of bed and repacking the room me and my roommate had managed to destroy in less than two days. I want to thank my Mom and Grandma for being the reason I could fit more than 2 pairs of clothes and a jacket in my suitcase. Without these two wizard’s spatial awareness and time management I would never have made it to San Francisco. At the same time, I had to figure out how to recreate their work which was time consuming and involved many repackings, but just in time I was ready to go without needing to use the pop out zipper. The trip to the airport and through security went off without a hitch, and by the time my cohort members were done putting their shoes and jackets back on (let’s go precheck!) I was ravenous. We decided to get airport udon, which I was initially skeptical about, but was actually delicious. I was going to buy some snacks with my leftover stipend, but my cute artisan candied pineapple rang up at 8 dollars. So no ‘stacks’, but plenty of granola bars and leftover udon.
The plane itself would have been uneventful if not for a near recreation of my flight to Malaysia many years ago. On the plane, as the other NSLI-Y students I was sitting with and I tried to squeeze our baggage underneath the seats in front of us, my hand came up from the floor sticky and wet. The farther under my seat I felt the more damp it became, until it was clear that underneath all of our seats was soaked, and steadily leeching towards our backpacks. We managed to make makeshift dams from the airline-provided blankets, and passed the rest of the flights watching the actually impressive collection of movies United has curated. While the mysterious liquid wasn’t Tiger Beer, the memories of the Malaysia flight made me surprisingly comfortable, despite the damp slickness clinging between my fingers. And instead of the bad airplane food (what’s the deal with that) I ate leftover udon and felt like a king.
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| Landing in Taiwan! |
We landed in Taiwan just outside of Taipei and made our way to customs. While waiting in line, I was furiously trying to figure out what greeting I should use. Should I say “hi”? “Hello”? What time is it, does a “good afternoon” suffice or is it nighttime already? Should I try Mandarin? And then I was at the front, frozen between saying “您好” and “hello”. The customs officer took one look at me and immediately pegged me rightfully as an American with little practical Chinese ability and cued me through with courteous English. We got our bags with no problem (thanks United for not sending any to Japan) and made our way onto our super Mario themed bus, to which everyone screamed “Mario!!”.
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| Taiwan at night |
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| Taiwain the following morning |
Taiwan’s highways and skylines look very similar to many cities in the US with smaller buildings gradually coalescing into tall apartment buildings and small skyscrapers. I had a wonderful moment of to myself listening to this album on the bus before taking a short cheat nap (on an hour) during the 3 and a half hour drive too Gaoxiong. Correct, from the top of Taiwan where our plane landed near Taipei to the very southern city of Gaoxiong, Taiwan is only slightly larger than Maryland, and takes only a little more time to drive North to South as Maryland does East to West. Despite similar drive times, the climate is wildly different. Keyword: hot. The sentence I’ve said the most since arriving in Gaoxiong beyond “sorry, my Chinese is very bad!” Is “台湾太热了”, which translates to “Taiwan is way too hot”. Stepping off the bus at a rest stop halfway through the drive we were hit with waves of hot, sticky tropical air, even at 11 at night in a more Northern part of Taiwan. As unsurprisingly uncomfortable the climate is, with the wave of heat came a wave of nostalgia. The air smells just like Malaysian air—slightly sweet, fresh, thick, with a hint of diesel fuel. It smelled familiar, like home, and was the first time I truly understood that I was going to live here for the next month and a half. By the time we got to the hotel I was so tired I couldn’t even feel it anymore. In fact, I was so jazzed I proceeded to take a forty five minute shower (though shorter than my usual) and eat several American chocolate candies that I decided wouldn’t travel well before forcing myself to crash.
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| Hotel snacks from our resident director |
The next two days in Gaoxiong we had almost completely to ourselves to relax, recuperate, and rest in the hotel. So naturally everyone in the cohort decided to immediately get outside and explore the city. I promptly added this as yet another reason why I love the cohort. It was an absolute blast. Sort of a repeat of our time spent relaxing in San Francisco, but with so much more freedom and such a completely different environment. Gaoxiong is an incredible city, bustling with people, motor scooters, cars, with every street lined with restaurants. Even though it's clearly busy there's a calmness to the city, a sort of unstressful and purposeful way people go about their days. We fell into this mood, and pretty much immediately got lost. With no idea where we were going and many of us not having changed our sims cards (so no google maps), we ended up splitting the group several times. My group wandered around a gorgeous park, explored our first Taiwanese 7-11 (which is a total upgrade from the states), and ended up hot, tired, and triumphant back at the hotel. The next day there wasn’t as much city wandering, and a group of us met in my hotel room to watch a Taiwanese version of The Little Mermaid called “The Mermaid Princess”. I highly recommend it. The animation quality is unity asset store level and for the storyline I think the writers went around the room each saying one word to formulate the plot. It was a surprisingly good assessment of our Chinese skills as the language level was very child friendly, and therefore very learner friendly. Another reason why I love the cohort—we ended up all talking throughout the movie comparing our hometowns, living experiences, and reasons why we wanted to study in Taiwan. Again, NSLI-Y picked an incredible group of people, and I’m very excited to spend the summer with them.
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| Lost at the park |
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| Yes!!! Burger king!!! Very chillburger |
That night, we met our host families for the first time. Before the program each NSLI-Y student was given very basic information about the family—a two sentence introduction, list of family members and ages, the parent’s careers, and each family members’ English proficiency. I was under the impression that each member of my host family spoke “basic” English, and that the father could communicate effectively. I arrived at the table with my host family and immediately realized how completely wrong I was. Apparently ‘Basic’ English consists of knowing how to say ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, and ’bathroom’, and the only member of the family who could communicate in English was the 15 year old daughter who was studying in school. While right now I’m very happy that’s how it turned out, as I pretty much exclusively speak to my host family in Mandarin (excluding the help from google translate when needed), in the moment I was extremely nervous. Way more nervous than expected. And what’s worse is I didn’t realize how rusty my Chinese is, and how utterly broken my grammar is in practice. Before NSLI-Y I’d only ever spoken to a few native speakers, one including my amazing Chinese teacher back home (hi Xiaomu!). But I think because my teacher is used to speaking with non native speakers, she can understand my Mandarin way better than native speakers who haven't spoken with a native English student. After a month of not studying intensely, apparently it was so bad I couldn’t speak in full sentences. I would string words together that I thought made sense, and my host family would stare expectantly, then whip out the pocket translator. But the night ended on a really nice note. My host family took me out for boba tea, and my host mom pointed out the college where I would be studying Mandarin. Ian’s (a member of the cohort) host family and mine are close friends, and we spent the rest of the night at their house eating Taiwanese fruits, cakes, playing pickleball in the dining room and Mario Kart in the living room.
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