End of Week One

Let me see, after the typhoon holiday things picked up a little bit.  On Friday we got picked up by our little bus and were brought to a place to get pictures taken for our resident cards.  I happened to be first in line so I followed the lady back into this room where she told me I could smile but not with my teeth and that my ears must show.   I thought I tucked my hair behind my ears sufficiently but she came over and adjusted it for me and also told me to tilt my head down.  I guess I needed help with that too because she came over and kind of adjusted my head a little bit.  In the resulting picture, my ears looks enormous and my smile looks slightly more like a sickly grimace.  But I told them it was fine and ignored the surprised looks on their faces.

Next we were taken to get cell phones, which we did without much incident.  I selected jaunty little red nokia which was popular among the other Fulbrighters.  Okay, probably not so much because of it’s jaunty redness, but mostly because of the cheap price.  Next we went to the Teacher’s Center, where we were told some things about living in Yilan and a little bit about what the next month is going to look like.  Starting next week we will get introduced to the teachers and schools that we could be working with and eventually will be able to go on school visits. 

After lunch and a little break we went on a little bus tour of the city.  We got to see the places we will be taking Chinese classes, the bus and train stations, Yilan University where there is a gym we could get memberships at (probably not happening in my case, but there’s a first time for everything right?) and finally stopped at Luna Plaza, this huge mall, which is actually only about a ten or 15 minute walk from my apartment.  First things first, a couple girls and I went to check out the bookstore and after perusing that for a while, we made our way downstairs to Carrefour, this huge hypermarket store (not to be confused with a supermarket…I learn so much from wikipedia).  I picked up a few things (like a mattress pad-great decision right there) but spent most of the time scoping out my options and trying to figure out what things were exactly.  Also, trying to figure out if I was getting a deal or not since I’m still adjusting to working with this money system and I’m not sure at all what the typical prices are.  Then I saw a foreigner (middle-aged friendly looking man, he looked like he’d be a nice dad to somebody) and I had the brilliant idea to follow him around to see what kinds of things he bought.  I figured we’d probably have similar tastes and would know what was worth buying and what wasn’t.  I followed him into the produce section where he stopped at a bunch of apples.  Well, I already knew those were good and I spotted someone handing out free samples of milk so I darted over there and was surprised to be greeted by a worker who was so excited to see me and kept asking me something about if a girl was looking for me, or if I’d seen a girl or something to that effect, I couldn’t quite catch everything she was saying, but for some reason instead of asking her to speak slower, I told her I hadn’t seen the girl which seemed to satisfy her.  Anyway, I got my free sample and next thing I knew I was walking away with a bottle of milk and  a carton of tea that came for free.  She was very persuasive.  In the midst of all that I lost sight of the foreigner so the rest of the shopping excursion was fairly blasé.  We got back to our apartments in the early evening and I took it easy and went to bed early since I was still completely exhausted.

Saturday was a pretty relaxing day just spent around Yilan.  My roommates and I and our neighbors tried a new little restaurant where the owner was so great.  She seemed thrilled by us and even gave us a free “Taiwan ham bao” is what she called it (Taiwan hamburger) when we didn’t know what it was.  I’m not sure what all was in it but it was pretty good, although there was only fat instead of meat, so that wasn’t ideal.  I ended up ordering fried rice anyway, which was pretty tasty.

That night some of us rode the bus to Taipei and got supper and hung out.  On our walk to the bus station we ran into some kind of parade.  There were tons of guys wearing light blue shirts that said International Lohas Festival.  (I had no idea what that was and unfortunately that link is the best explanation I could find…).  To me it just looked like a religious parade.  We watched for a little bit, but I didn’t mind leaving when we did because a guy was just starting to play a didgeridoo and those have kind of given me the creeps since my youth. 

Here's some random shots of the parade.  It's hard to see much besides the crowd, but that's mostly what I saw anyway

Anyway, Taipei looks like a really interesting city, and it will be fun to go back there!  On the way home, we had to ride a different bus because the other bus stopped running earlier.  At this point we were fairly tired and fell asleep on the hour long bus ride, not waking up until the last bus stop when we found out we were in Luo Dong, which is a few kilometers past Yilan…oops.  The bus driver was so apologetic (not that he had anything to do with us missing our stop) and he told us that in the future we should tell the bus driver where we need to get off because then they will make sure to stop and that we get off, because he didn’t even stop in Yilan since he didn’t know.  Well, now we know.  So we just hopped in a taxi and realizing that we didn’t know our address and the street name wasn’t seeming to ring a bell with the driver, we just had him go to Luna Plaza and walked back from there.

Despite the later night, Sunday morning I woke up a little early and decided to venture out on a little walk.  The other day our Fulbright neighbors discovered a little path somewhere across the street and some of the more ambitious ones go running on it.  I thought I could take a leisurely stroll down it and I was able to find it  easily enough and it is surprising close…I never would have guessed it was there if they hadn’t told me.  I didn’t go very far but I’m sure I’ll be back to scope it out some more.

There were people farming but I'm not sure what it was