Taiwan

Arrival in Taiwan took only a couple of hours from Japan. I have gotten pretty good now at finding where to go for passport check-in and customs at the airport. My friend Wayne picked me up from the airport and after dropping my luggage off at his house we drove to one of Taiwan's "night markets." These are very well known in Taiwan and they are popular places to go when you want to hang out with friends and eat a lot of food (for a great price!). The night market has every kind of Taiwanese dish and drink. There is fresh fruit juice squeezed right in front of you, milk tea, every kind of meat and tofu. There are also different carnival-type games to play too. One dish I tried is very famous in Taiwan. It's called stinky tofu. It smells like a toilet, sort of. This is one food that does NOT taste how it smells. It actually is good if you can just get past the smell. It's pretty spicey too! I also ate something that was basically an American corndog. To drink I had some juice milk tea (the consistencey was like a fruit smoothy, but it tasted COMPLETELY differnt from a smoothy)---it was great!! Milk tea is really popular here--every restaurant seems to have it! Also, I had 'bubble tea.' This is just tea with these chewy tapioca balls at the bottom. It was not bad at all. After this I was pretty much full but I wanted to try one last thing, so I got this fried dough ball that had a piece of squid in the center. The toppings on this was what made it so good. There was some wasabe (so I think this was more of a Japanese dish than Taiwanese) horse raddish-mayo and a hefty sprinkling of dried salmon on top (or some other kind of fish--I am not sure exactly). So, after being in Taiwan for about three hours I got a small sampling of the tastey food I have been hearing so much about. Many of my friends (from both China and Taiwan) told me how much I would enjoy Taiwan's food--they were right!

I took a train from my friend's house in the northern part of Taiwan (near the capital of Taipei) to the southern part in a city called Gaoxiong. At the train station Dr. Yiching Lin picked me up and we drove to the Gaoxiong Medical University where I stayed for one week in a dorm. Dr. Lin has been doing a lot to prepare for my arrival. For the first week I was learning how to use the equipment for my research project, creating a plan, all the while meeting the people in Dr. Lin's lab. I got to see some of the sights in Gaoxiong by riding around on a motorbike/scooter (wearing a helmet, don't worry, haha). Gaoxiong is along the western coast of Taiwan, so I got a ride to a beach at the base of this big mountain where I watched the sunset. The weather was perfect and the scenery was beautiful.

One morning I woke up around 6:30AM to go hiking with some of my new friends. We hiked for about 2 or 3 hours up this mountain which was part of a forest preserve adjacent to the city. This was when I had the first of many monkey sigthings. They just walked right past us like it was nothing. The hike was really refreshing.

The night market in Gaoxiong was a lot of fun. I played a few of the games and I won a bottle of apple soda! I tried all kinds of food and different kinds of teas. I ate fish and pork and various kinds of bird eggs, aswell as sticky rice, tofu, ice cream, and some sweet, fried bread filled with sugary bean paste--I was STUFFED. On one of my final nights before leaving Gaoxiong (to go start my research) I went to eat a certain style of dish called 'hot pot.' This is basically a big pot, which is divided in the middle. In each half of the pot is a soup broth. One broth was spicey (because I told my my friends how much I love spicey food) and the other broth was a regular non-spicey broth. This all heats up on a hot plate sitting on the table. Next the waitress brought out dishes of various meat, fish, clams, vegetables and dumplings. I ate pretty much whatever my they brought out. I even had some pig intestine and coagulated duck blood (which just tasted like especially squishy tofu). It was all really good. I enjoyed eating the different kinds of vegetables too. There are a lot that we don't have in the US---there was something similar to a raddish that was traslated as a 'white carrot' and some other kinds that I can't really explain. The 'white carrot' is nothing like the raddish we have in the US. This one actually does look like a carrot, as the name implies.

So as you can tell I have been doing a lot of eating---besides that though, I have been doing a lot of work for my project. There is a lot of preparation that I needed to do. Everyone here has been running around to help me get supplies.

I feel like I will never be able to say "Thank you" enough to everyone here because they ALL have been extremely kind to me, especially Dr. Lin!! People insisted on giving me rides to different places, taking me with them to eat (and translating the menu when I could not understand it--which was most of the time), and helping with any question or problem I had. They really do SO much to make sure everything is going fine.

After a week of meeting new people and getting to try a variety of food I headed off to the city of Kending with Dr. Lin and a senior student named Xiami. We drove about 2.5 hours until we reached the place where I am doing research. The forest I am working in is part of a national forest preserve and park. Kending is a beautiful area of Taiwan that attracts a lot of tourists (including Taiwanese vacationers). I am living in the staff dorm here in the preserve. I get my own room and bathroom which is nice. The staff comes and goes from the building all day because there is a big living room area and a kitchen (so people sometimes come to eat and watch TV when they have the time) . I am cooking my own meals which is consisting of heating frozen dumplings, rice, pasta, sandwhiches and other similar quick foods. I have also been eating a lot of Guava--which I am thinking is one of my new favorite fruit.

In the mornings I wake up around 5:45AM to get ready for a day of trecking through the forest. This forest is like nothing I have ever been in. Aside from the many monkeys, spiders, and lizards, there are huge jagged rocks everywhere. Thousands of years ago Taiwan used to be a huge coral reef, so the forest is now lime stone with trees growing out from the rocks. There are big rock structures everywhere so steep than you can't climb up. The trees and undergrowth is really thick (with plenty of thorny bushes) so walking around was quite a trip during the first few days. After the first week (with map and compass in hand) I finally have steady feet while hiking and a sense of where to go. So far the weather has been rainy everyday when I go to the forest. I mean VERY RAINY! As in you can't hear the person talking next to you because the rain is so loud. Additionally, the cicada get really loud when it starts to rain for some reason. I practically had to yell when speaking to Dr. Lin to say anything. The rain storms were fun though all in all.

Now I am in Gaoxiong for the weekend to see the graduation ceremony. It'll be interesting to see how it is compared to the US ceremony.

(I will put up photos of everything soon)