Sorry for the fortnight of radio silence.  (I actually had an appropriate scenario to use the word “fortnight” … that was at least 15 years in the making.)

Training was long and intense– nine hours of lectures and little-kid songs every day for 10 days straight was exhausting and all I really felt like doing was showering, eating, and going to bed.  My apologies.

My training group

The first two weeks, summarized

I survived the Pacific Ocean.  It was pleasant actually– in Allison-fashion, I fell asleep within the first five minutes of every movie I tried to watch.  It only took me three attempts to finish the movie Up in its entirety.

When I walked out of customs, I met a HESS driver holding my name card.  I showed him my address in Mandarin, and we were off to New Taipei City around 11 p.m.  Passing the city lights of Taipei and road signs I could’t understand, it was hard to believe I was actually here.

When I got to the apartment, Tammy and I had the most epic hug ever.  At that moment, it  would have been nice to be famous so that someone might have photographed our reunion, but alas, I am not famous, and it was not photographed.  All I’ve got to remember it was the overwhelming feeling of happiness and disbelief that I was truly standing in a stairwell in New Taipei City with the friend I’ve been skyping for three years.  It was confirmation that this year was going to be full of feelings I’ve never experienced before, emotions that can’t be fully described, only fully felt.

We heaved my bags up three flights of stairs, talked for a while, and then I went to bed with amazingly little jet lag.  Having the sleeping ability of a koala bear helps with that.

The next day, HESS organized a trip to Danshui, a market area with food stalls, vendors selling toys and knick-knacks, and restaurants overlooking the beautiful Danshui river.  I met a lot of the people in my training group, which I’d find out the next day included 51 people from the USA, Canada, England, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.  We also visited Fort San Domingo, which was built by the Spanish in the 1600s during their occupation of northern Taiwan.  The second floor of the building was dedicated to love and relationships.  Couples shared their love stories on video, and you could also read advice from various people on how to have a successful relationship.

“Every man is a poet when he is in love.” Yes, Plato. Yes.

Bear outside Fort San Domingo

Sunday, Tammy and I played volleyball with some of her friends and lab mates at a nearby college.  Monday I was off to the hotel that HESS put us up in for training, First Hotel.  My roommate, Julia, was from Tennessee and we got along really well.  We went to dinner one night at a sushi restaurant where you order your raw fish on a little computer screen, and then a toy car delivers the sushi right to you.  All you have to do is pick up the plate from the back of the car and then it speeds away.

Meanwhile, back at the hotel, we had black mold all over our walls, so we decided to switch rooms.  Thankfully our new room was much better (and black mold-free).  Still figuring out what that hotel ever placed first in…

Later in the week, Tammy helped me get my booster vaccine for Japanese Encephalitis.  I don’t have national health insurance yet since I just got here and haven’t started officially working.  But the medical care here was the fastest and cheapest I’ve ever experienced.  The same shot in the US required making an appointment weeks in advance, and the shot itself cost more than $200.  Here, no appointment necessary– you can walk right in and see a doctor on the spot.  The whole visit (shot included) cost about $13 USD.  Why is the American healthcare system so broken and how hasn’t anyone fixed it yet?!  Taiwan prompts this question and many others of the United States.  How come our 7-Elevens aren’t as awesome as the ones here?  How come we don’t have people selling fried chicken outside of my house at midnight?  Why aren’t our cities’ metro systems perfect and organized and on-time?  Why is everything 10 times cheaper here?  These are the questions I ask.

One thing I think the US does better than Taiwan is doors.  Just look at our keys.

Don’t they look like mini skylines?

There are two sets of doors that I need to unlock to exit the apartment and then lock again from the outside.  The first key I turn twice, and the second key I turn four times!  It took three people and about half an hour to figure out that I needed to apply pressure to the second door to actually get the key out of the keyhole.

My first weekend after training I actually had some time to travel outside the city, so I hung out with Howard, my friend from the TUSA scholarship.  Saturday night we went back to Danshui, except this time we took a ferry across the river and explored the night market on the other side too.

Riding the ferry at night

There was a turkish ice cream stand across the river, and I’ve gotta say, I’ve never seen anything like it.  The man pulled a scoop of ice cream from the bucket, handed me a cone, and acted as if he was going to put it in the cone.  But then he knocked the cone over.  But THEN when the cone twirled over itself, I realized it was all a part of his act.  He tricked me with his foolery over and over again, with different ice cream cones appearing in my hand, then disappearing from my hand, then falling out of my hand, and then one finally being saved at the last second by its own elasticity.  The sticky ice cream clung to the scoop, even when it was being held upside down.

This isn’t the same ice cream man, but maybe it will give you an idea of what happened:

The next day Howard and I went to a beach in Taipei County.  It was the perfect way to end my first weekend in Taiwan.