Travel and Day 1: Plane, Taipei Zoo, Maokong Gondola, Shida Night Market

The voyage from Maryland to Taiwan took in all around twenty-four hours. The longest leg was from Detroit to Japan, for which we flew for twelve hours. I had some things to read and a Chinese film to watch, so the flight was not too bad.

Arrival in Taipei,where a strange creature greeted me

Departure from BWI--Sunday

The hostel I am staying in during my time in Taiwan is called the Cat's Pajamas. The heads of CAPEC have recommended it for a few years to their Taiwan Studies Scholarship recipients, presumably because of its price, location, and the positive reports of returning students. My own report should be considered as following this trend: the Cat's Pajamas is great! It is a wonderful place for a student staying in Taipei, because of the special, small community that it initiates one into. The foreign guests and the young Taiwanese hosts all congregate in the common areas, talking, laughing, and cooking together, and go out into the city for market-trips and meals, sight-seeing, and social evenings.

There are about twenty guests in the hostel, which means that it is just about at capacity (the extent of the hostel is the basement and street-level floor of one building). Among these guests, the Anglosphere is heavily represented: there is a Londoner, a few Canadians, and some Americans, including one of the other two students of GMU who received the scholarship. There is a girl who grew up in Chile and now attends an American university, a young French pair, and a girl from Southern China. After my first full day, I had met and begun to get to know all of them (with the exception of the Chinese girl, who today returned to the hostel after finishing a mini-trip to another city in Taiwan).

Most of the Americans and Canadians are here to study Mandarin Chinese at Taiwan Normal University, having received scholarships from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education for this reason. Each has been studying Chinese for a different length of time, and yet there are some whose ability to speak is truly impressive. The owner and hired staff at the hostel, who are all young Taiwanese students or recent graduates, are also very friendly and lots of fun. They have shown us some great and fun places in their native city.

On my first day in Taiwan, I went to the zoo with two of the other students here, who have both been here for a few weeks. Afterwards, we went on a trip in the Maokong Gondola, which goes up the side of a mountain which affords great views of that part of the city. The top of the Taipei 101 tower can be seen just over the top of the mountain next over. In the evening, we visited the night market in the Shida District (named after Shida University, called in English National Taiwan Normal University, which is the one working with us in our research), where we had dinner. It was lu wei, a dish for which we selected the vegetables and meats by putting them into a basket, which the vender then cooked in oil and added sauces to. This Taiwanese dish was delicious!

My first plate of lu wei

A panda from the zoo