6/30/2012:

Jet lag hit me early in the morning, when I woke up at 5am and couldn’t go back to sleep. I ended up roaming around the dark house, cutting some fruit, reading a few chapters out of the book I had brought for airplane reading (Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink), rolling around in bed, listening to music, and eventually getting up to get the day started when my alarm went off at 7. We left at 8 to go to Jing Shan, an area further north of Keelung that is famous for its hot springs, both natural and artificial. The place we went to was about an hour drive away, and had many different pools...there was a ridiculously hot pool (I liked this one a lot, I’m always cold) and a cold pool, as well as strange ones like a rose water pool, a milk water pool, and a lemon water pool.

Our food adventures continued after our visit to the springs- lunch was at a small restaurant known for its local vegetables and seafood. We ordered a few dishes: two leafy vegetables, a beef stir fry, a seafood trio (clams, octopus, and shrimp) with onions, white bamboo, bitter melon, and a tofu vegetable soup. Next door to the restaurant was a small convenience store that sold cheap and fantastic ice ocream (it reminded me of the Thrifty’s inside Rite Aid) in Asian flavors like red bean, taro, peanut, and longan-my favorite of the selection :)

There were a few more spots to hit before heading home, including various shops that are famous for zhong zi (sticky rice and meat wrapped in bamboo leaves), mochi, grilled corn on the cob, and CAKES (I love the Asian bakery smell). Our Uncle told us that some of these shops were alongside the road that runs right at the edge of the island(like PCH runs along California’s coast), which is the same road that our dad used to ride his little motorbike up and down when he was in college.

Taiwanese beaches are nothing like southern California beaches, and I have to admit that I miss the latter. The beach here is just piles of old concrete and steep rocky dropoffs. However, I've heard that there are actual sand beaches in Tai Dong, so I'm looking forward to that.

Tomorrow, we convene with the rest of the student teachers at Jian Tan, and will be split into what sounded like a dorm-esque arrangement. This should be interesting.

Taiwan

So, to fill in those of you who I haven’t had the opportunity to speak with in person recently:

My brother and I are four years apart. This summer, we are celebrating two graduations: his from high school, and mine from college. As this is probably the only entirely free summer we have together, our parents chose to give us the gift of culture by sending us to their homeland of

Taiwan for a month. Of course, we cannot just sit in our relatives’ homes rolling around for days and asking them to entertain us- that would be terrible in terms of 人情,so we both applied to a volunteer teaching program, bringing English to small elementary and secondary schools all over the island.

We were both accepted, and received our school assignments. My brother will be teaching elementary English in the former military/current airbase of Jingmen, a tiny island that is closer to the coast of China than it is to Taiwan. I will be in Taidong, in a little village nestled at the foot of the mountains, teaching secondary school. We receive basic instructional training for a week in Jiantan, and are then sent off to our respective schools.

I am writing this from Keelung (Jilong), which is in the mountains of northern Taiwan. We are staying with family friends for a few days before the start of the program, in order to roam around, eat good food, and let our internal clocks settle into Taiwan time (15 hours ahead of Pacific Standard).

Even though I’ve only been in here for two days out of the eventual four weeks, that’s time enough to really notice how different Taiwan is from California. These are just a few things I saw on the first day alone...

1. GREEN EVERYWHERE. The tropical climes of the island yield a lush natural landscape.

2. BUGS EVERYWHERE. Everywhere you go, even indoors, you can hear a high-pitched buzzing

noise… it seems unfamiliar at first, until I realize that it sounds just like what I hear the morning

after dancing next to speaker sets at raves. This sound is not an audial aftereffect, however-

it’s the sound of thousands of cicadas singing from the trees. I’ve also seen at least 30 different

types of butterfly since arriving.

3. WATER EVERYWHERE. It hangs in the air like a sticky, heavy cloud.

4. BARSOOMIAN BIRDS. Sparrowlike little things with pitchfork tails? Ginormous avian beings with comically long, white necks? Vibrant lime green birds with red-orange eyes? ALIENS.

5. THE BIGGEST MANGOES I HAVE EVER SEEN. At the grocery store, there are those red-and-green mangoes, and there are those little yellow kidney-shaped mangos that are about the size of a tomato. Well here, they’re the size of papayas. NORMALLY.

As I find more interesting observations, I will expand this list. In general, however , I will also try to update this as often as I can find stable internet, as an attempt to both

1. Really get this baby blog going

2. Document what might be our last trip to Taiwan in a while

3. Give my readers a peek at the beautiful island, as I experience much of it for the very first time as well

Vocabulary Volume #1

Words to know, memorize, and attempt to use more often. + interesting words.

holistic: comprehension of something's parts as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole. the entire person as a collective social, spiritual, logical being, not just a physical entity.

quotidian: occurring every day. to the extreme, the quotidian becomes the mundane

prelapsarian/postlapsarian: before the fall of man/after the fall of man. innocence/sinful knowledge

[currently listening to: Cary Brothers]

Flyer

I scrubbed voraciously at a dark grey smear of paint that was marring the pristine yellow surface of my flyer. Someone must have tapped it on their way out of the lot, I thought to myself. How careless... it was probably someone who hadn't needed to work two side jobs like I had in order to finally purchase my own Model 3. The grimace that had made its way onto my face while I scrubbed melted into a slight grin as I remember how proud I had felt the day I walked into Fusion's Flyers with enough money in my account to claim ownership over one of their beautiful, sleek machines.

Content that I had removed most of the offending paint, I tossed my messenger bag into the compartment behind the driver's seat. As I hopped into the shallow basin seat of my flyer, I pressed my hand onto the driver touchpad. The screen flickered green and the engine emitted a low, melodic hum as the lightweight metal began lifting ever so slightly off the ground. The moment I felt the spindly metal legs click as they folded in seamlessly to the bullet-shaped body of the flyer, I pushed my finger firmly onto the pad. The flyer shot forward with a roar, and every vertebra of my spine compressed horizontally into the springy black cushion of the backrest, as if they had each forgotten something important at our point of departure and were reaching back in time and space for it.

Once my back had relaxed and my body had settled itself with its new state of motion, I used my index finger to draw an arc on the touchpad, a gentle, curving one extending from the lower left-hand quadrant to the upper right one. The flyer began following my drawn trajectory, and I could feel the seat dipping sideways as if it were trying to spill me out to the right. I flew past a large water tower, the third one that had been built to supplement the dryness here on Mars. Photographs from my History of Settlement class had shown it in its early building stages, a glossy white monolith. Now, having been facing Mars' frequent windstorms for at least 7 years, it was no longer white but a shade of rusted pink; a color that matched the streaks cast by the setting sun on the planet's dusty skies.

[currently listening to: Omnia & Ira -The Fusion | Zedd ft. Matthew Koma -Spectrum ]