5/30/10 – Lion Dog!

Hey y'all it's been a while. So, I've been completely immersed in the culture here (sort of) and have picked up a Taiwanese drawl when I speak my Engrish now. So some strange / cool / interesting things that have occurred since my last posting. I finally moved into my apartment which is a single and it's pretty ballin. Surprisingly enough, it's bigger than my room at home which I suppose just shows how small said room is ... It did not come with toilet paper (which I found out the annoying way) and some other bathroom items, so I ended up going to this store similar to Walmart to get stuff. This leads to my next topic: Shopping carts! Shopping carts in Taiwan are SO freaking entertaining! first off they're small and fun sized and add to that, all four wheels are swively as opposed to only the front ones. This is just a recipe for myself standing out as a tourist as I push my shopping cart sideways through the entire store . I win! Next topic: Lion Dog. No, seriously: lion dog. The place where I usually get breakfast has this dog with a haircut like a lion. It's close shaved on the body except for a huge poofy mane around the neck and a nice tuft of hair on the tail. He's super friendly though and occasionally likes to nudge my legs when I eat =) Motorcycles. Almost everyone here drives motorcycles. Did I also mention that there are basically no traffic laws? A guy from the lab, Mitchell, took me to Zhong Li downtown on his motorcycle and holy crap I nearly crapped my pants. High speeds, weaving in and out of traffic, and liberal use of the horn was very tramatic. So my dad's already gone and left me in this strange country and that first day alone, WOW, I was relieved, but at the same time kind of nervous without a translator to help me find all the awesome food. No worries though! The people in the lab are too nice to me and show me all the cool places to eat and what to order which is pretty awesome. I also had a little adventure yesterday and went to Taipei to meet up with my aunt and uncle who were staying there a couple nights. I sort of knew how to get there via train and sort of did not know how to get back, but I was ready for some fun! Ding! Funny Story! I fell asleep on the way there and woke up at a relatively busy stop and just hopped off. I went up the escalator and asked if I was in Taipei. They said no so I ended up sprinting back down the stairs and across the Platform, barely making it back into that train, and clearly marking myself as a tourist/idiot. Yay! So I got to Taipei, found my aunt/uncle and we ate dinner/hungout at the night market for a couple hours. To get back, I ended up asking pretty much every person I saw which train I had to take to get back to Zhong Li. Eventually I made it though and got home safe and sound (Phew!). That's ALL for now I guess. Peace!

5/14/10 - Really Studious Mosquitoes!

So the past couple nights, I haven’t been able to sleep very well. It’s a mix of jet lag coupled with the merciless mosquitoes. However last night, I slept like a baby. I got back from the lab around 8:30 and just straight up passed out on my bed and slept 12 hours (so awesome!). Something that I’m not used to is the work ethic over here. The grad students in the lab practically live there. Some of them come at 9am and don’t leave til past midnight, sometimes past 2am. Hell, even the mosquitoes have more work ethic here. They’re always on the move. You try to shoo them away, and they’re constantly buzzing around and pestering you. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if I looked like a leper when I got back. It’s been 3 days and I’ve been bitten like 30 times already. Do the math and I’m getting 10 bites a day and they take a week to go away so I’ll be constantly maintaining like 70 bites on my body. Hot stuff. A particularly cheerful grad student in my lab has taken it upon himself to show me all the good places to eat. We're becoming such good friends. Food really bridges the language barrier. Every day around 6ish, everyone leaves for dinner and he tells me he’s taking me to the night market to check out some new dish. Yesterday, we went to the best place in the city for fried dumplings. Let me just say that I was in heaven. Ten enormous dumplings, golden brown and fried to perfection with some slightly spiced up soy sauce, all for under $2. I just might go there every night from now on. If I had a last meal on earth, I’d eat probably there (or maybe Andiamo’s for some rice balls). I also met with the landlord of the apartment I’ve been looking at. It’s a small single (even though it’s definitely bigger than my room back home) and I’d be paying around $150 a month for it. The bed is oddly dimensioned though so I’ll have to buy new sheets that fit. I believe my dad and I are going to sign the lease tonight so I can move in tomorrow! :)

5/11/10 - Ouch Not a Dancing Penguin

So I got to the airport around 6am and the very first thing I noticed when I walked out of that terminal was this strange statue of a man wearing a I <3 Taipei tshirt except his head was a ginormous tomato. It was so strange. I’ll have to post a picture of it later. Dad and I had a few hours to kill and we decided to kick it in a cafe with passionfruit and mango smoothies. The cab ride to Jhong Li was pretty short and uneventful. Once we settled into the room, we explored around campus a little to find necessities such as Seven Eleven, laundromat, post office, ATM (definitely), etc. Getting a SIM card for my phone was an absolute pain. We took a cab to the phone store and found out I needed documents. Took a cab back to the room to get my passport. Took a cab back to the store and found out I didn’t have a second form of ID because they didn’t accept my drivers license or MCard. Took a cab back so my dad could get his documents Took a cab to the store again and found out that the form required certain taiwanese documents that he didn’t have. We decided to stop for lunch in a noodle shop and it was freaking amazing. It was like a gallon sized bowl of soup/noodles for $3. I made the mistake, however, of wearing sandals (and I got quite a scolding later about it) when something in that shop either bit or stung me on the foot and it started swelling like a bloomin’ cherry tomato. Stupid foreign insects. We walked back to the room, but Mr. Foot was all ouch and no fun. When we returned to the room, my dad found his taiwanese passport. He cabbed back to the store while I took a nap cause I was not a dancing penguin (get it? not happy feet!) and he returned finally with a SIM card but they said it would take a couple hours before it was activated. We had a meeting scheduled at 5 with the dean, but Dad and I passed out for a while because of the jet lag. They called us at 5:15 wonder if we got lost. oops. Meeting over food may be the best idea ever cuz I was starving. Afterwords, we tried to find the night market, but ended up just getting lost and just walking back to the room.

Conclusion: Getting a SIM card takes 7 cab rides. Foreign insects hate me.