Muddled

I have to thank Typhoon Saola for the raucous welcome it gave as I stepped off the plane in Taoyuan airport. There’s nothing like 100 mph winds and a meter of rain to start off a good year.

I’m here through the American government’s Fulbright program, where I’ll be teaching English and completing independent research for the next year. My TPE to DCA ticket home is booked for August 1, 2013, and I can’t wait to see what experiences the next twelve months will bring. I’m living and working in Yilan County, a plain nestled between the central mountains and the Pacific Ocean, about 45 minutes outside of Taipei. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and on a good day (i.e. no typhoons) I should be able to see both the mountains and the ocean from my seventh floor apartment. Taiwan was originally named Ilha Formosa–beautiful island–by Portuguese explorers who discovered it in the 16th century, and it is easy to see why. The dramatic cliffs, sapphire-blue water, and tropical greenery make for a stunning sight.

For those of you who read my previous Beijing blog, I apologize for the infrequent posts and abandoning the blog halfway through the semester. I’m dedicated to keeping this one up to date throughout the entire year, and hope that it will be a good way for friends and family to have an idea of what I’m up to, and for me to record and remember some of my more interesting experiences.

The last few days have already been quite an adventure. On my flight over from Los Angeles, I sat between a Vietnamese nun and a eccentric woman who riddled me (as well as the English-limited nun) with sensationalist tales from her past including a supposed run-in with a great white in Perth where she escaped unharmed but her friend wasn’t so lucky…     At first this was rather entertaining, but after the first few hours of non-stop stories, I started to go a little crazy. I feel that there are definitely a few unwritten rules of airplane etiquette that this woman was breaking:

1. You don’t interrupt people when they are reading; 2. When people put their headphones on you generally don’t disturb them; 3. If someone turns to look out the window during a lull in conversation you don’t start up a whole new story.

I ended up having to fake sleep just to get some peace and quiet.

Since arriving in Taiwan life has revolved around the typhoon, which is currently a category 2 storm (equivalent to a cat 2 hurricane) and Yilan is currently in the eye of the storm. Last night, preparations involved rushing to the supermarket to pick up flashlights, water, and dry food for my new apartment, and subsequently realizing both how terrible my chinese has become and how terrible it is to be illiterate. While Taiwan speaks more or less the same mandarin as mainland China, the writing system is a lot different. In the 1960s China moved to a simplified form of Chinese characters while Taiwan and Hong Kong did not. Some characters are the same, but the majority of them look extremely different. Trying to figure out what type of batteries were needed in the new flashlight while rushing to get home before the roads get flooded out was quite an adventure. My roommates and I were mostly successful, but we did find out this morning while making scrambled eggs that the jug of milk we bought last night was actually a jug of yogurt.

The winds and rain have been pretty intense overnight and into today, but things have held up pretty well. It seems that the buildings are built quite sturdily and have some great extra features. Some of the coolest are the storm walls–metal barricades that can be pulled down over glass windows and sliding glass doors. Nerdily enough, lowering them last night when the 130 mph wind gusts started hitting was quite a fun time. I felt like I was in Star Wars ordering the blast doors to be closed before the storm troopers busted in.

Luckily, beyond lots of flooding and some collapsed billboards the area around our apartment is doing pretty well. Wish me luck for the second half of the storm, and I’ll be posting again soon when the storm lets up.