Tainan: Part 1

It all started two weeks ago when my LET from Dong Xing, Siena, told me she was going to an environmental education conference in Tainan (in southern Taiwan) and that I should go with her.  The next thing I knew I was laboriously copying down the characters for Dong Xing (and all sorts of other words I didn’t know how to write) on my registration form for this three day conference.

Well, this past Thursday morning rolled around and I met up with Siena outside the local McDonalds at 6:50 and she me led to the town hall where there was a parking lot where we could park our scooters and get on the bus that was taking us and about 25 other teachers and principals from around the area.  The first person we saw was a lady who was carrying (besides her luggage) two huge bags of bread and lots of soymilk and while we were lending her a hand to carry all the goods onto the bus, I was thinking it seemed a bit extreme to take all of that on a three-day trip, but it turns out she was one of the people in charge and had brought us all some breakfast!

Well, we left the parking lot and immediately went to the train station where we picked up some people who were coming from other cities and nearly got stuck trying to go around the narrow little turn around circle.  I have no idea why the bus driver pulled the bus into that tiny road and didn’t just stop on the street.  Somehow we made it and went on to Yilan where we stopped to pick up more people and then we were off!  I realized we were headed towards Taipei, which is north, and I knew we were supposed to be going to Tainan, which is southwest, and when I inquired, my LET told me that there aren’t roads over the mountains so we had to go up and around.  Anyway, we also stopped in Taipei to pick up another teacher or two and our tour guides.  I didn’t realize we were having tour guides, but there they were.

Our first real stop was somewhere between Taipei and Tainan (I never really quite knew where we were whenever we stopped) and it was at a man’s house.  As far as I understood (which certainly wasn’t very far) this man turned a restaurant into a house and made it very eco-friendly.  He used all kinds of recycled materials to build it and it had a dual layer ceiling which played a big roll in the heating/cooling system.  The second ceiling kept the house 30 degrees Celsius cooler, so it was a pretty big deal.  His house was too small for the whole group to tour at once though, so while the right side of the bus toured first, my side went to a Confucius temple for about 10 minutes.  I mostly just glanced around.  Quite frankly, I don’t really enjoy visiting temples.  Then Siena bought me some passion fruit tea, which I do enjoy, and then we toured the eco-friendly house.

Part of the temple

Confucius was the "Teacher's Teacher" so this is where students can write down and hang up their requests. Like if they have a big test coming up and want help to pass.  Some people come back and post their results if they do really well

This is the adorable dog at the eco-friendly house and his recycled chair

After another while on the bus we stopped at Ten Way Gardens and had lunch (at an all you can eat buffet) and then got a tour of the gardens.  For most of this tour I didn’t really know what was being said.  At one point I went to find the bathroom and got lost so I also missed a fair portion of the tour as well.  Actually the only way I found the bathroom was by stumbling into a courtyard of someone’s and setting the dog off barking and a woman came out and pointed really emphatically while saying “over there!” in Chinese.  Apparently she knew exactly what I was looking for.  I just thanked her and scurried away in the direction she sent me.

I felt very welcome here (although no one actually spoke any English to me)

After this, our next stop was a Togo village, or maybe just Togo Village…I didn’t really understand what it was called.  I’m not sure if Togo is the name of a people or what.  It seemed to be a village that had been rebuilt about ten years ago.  I don’t know what had happened to it or why it needed to be rebuilt, but it was mentioned multiple times that there had only been one water buffalo left, so that was really significant I guess.  Anyway, we got there and a man met us and took us on a tour.  He had a microphone and speakers that he carried with him and the volume was super high.  I’m pretty sure the whole village heard that entire tour.  He gave it in Taiwanese though so I didn’t understand any of it.  At one point another man came and took over and he spoke Chinese but at that point I wasn’t really understanding much anyway.  I was super tired from listening to Chinese and trying to understand it all day…that’s tiring work!!  At some point one of the women (I could tell right from the get go that she was a bit eccentric) broke away from the tour and spent about half an hour or more in some random person’s house playing the er hu with the family.  I didn’t even notice she was gone until she came out of the house on our way back.  We also met an old man who kept doing one-legged squats saying, “I’m 75 years old!”  He did them holding a baby and went really deep and held it.  It was super impressive although extremely odd.  I’m a little unclear how that all started but everyone thoroughly enjoyed it.

We also ate supper at this village and there was some kind of documentary playing while we ate.  I was busying scarfing down food when I felt the ground moving and I swayed in my chair a little bit.  For some reason the fact that the ground isn’t supposed to move didn’t really register until my teacher leaned over and said that there was just an earthquake.  So that was my first earthquake and I hope it’s my last.

This is where we ate supper, but I mostly took the picture because the desks look pretty much exactly like my desk back from 1st grade at my Chinese school

We eventually got to our hotel and found groups of four to share a room.  I had the eccentric woman in my room and immediately upon entering our room she pulled out her yoga mat and began doing yoga.  I kind of just sat on the bed because there was no room to do anything else.  We had to go to a meeting shortly afterwards though and then we went to the hot spring that is at the hotel.  I guess it’s famous for its muddy hot springs, but then they said that the ones at the hotel were fake hot springs…but they assured me that the mud was real.  Anyway, it was really nice, although the weather was a bit hot to be in a hot spring.  The eccentric woman was there too and she also turned out to be really nice, besides being a bit unconventional.

I was horrified to see this in the lobby of the hotel, but the hotel turned out to be really nice despite this monstrosity that was greeting us first thing (ugh, it still makes me cringe)