Taiwan, Touch Your Heart

Sooo... I made it to Taiwan!  After spending an exhausting day in Taipei exploring and doing official orientation stuff and only sleeping 3ish hours out of 50, we finally went to bed in a really cool hotel called "Just Sleep" and headed out for Yilan this morning via chartered bus.  Run-on sentence much?

While some of the kids live in neighboring Luodong township, I live in an apartment with two other super cool ladies in Yilan city.  We live on the 7th floor which gives us a pretty nice view of the city, surrounding mountains and even Turtle Island.  Yilan is a really beautiful area with lush mountains and rice paddies.

Here are some things that I've learned so far:

1. Taiwan is HOT and HUMID.  so hot. so humid. so sweaty.

2.  It reminds me a lot of living in Thailand, which is nice because not everything seems entirely foreign.  The buildings are similar in their construction and there's a similar mass amount of 7-11 shops, as well as scooters.

3.  Taiwanese people don't accentuate their tones as much when speaking Chinese, which means I now kick butt at speaking Chinese.  Hellz yeah.

4.  Lysol sets off carbon monoxide detectors (confirmed by Google).  Or else we have a carbon monoxide leak, one of the two.  We're pretty sure the first.


My apartment has 3 bedrooms with air conditioning, Wi-Fi, a nice but very small kitchen, laundry balcony, 2 other balconies, 2 bathrooms, and a big living room.  It came with a bunch of stuff that had been left behind by past years' Fulbrighters, including a little grill for the balcony so we can BBQ!  It really is pretty nice and everyone has been so helpful in getting us set up and settled in, even the helpful cashier at 7-11.  Also, the bottom floor of my apartment complex houses not only a BABY CENTER but also a 7-11 and a musical instruments store!  Pretty cool.

I've never dealt with cockroaches before, but our apartment had two today.  We squished them and sprayed Raid all over the bathroom and along all the bedroom doorways.

I'm excited to get out and explore the area around our apartment, find some good places to eat and make some neighborhood friends!  Both Yilan and Luodong are supposed to have really awesome night markets, so that'll be exciting to check out.

Tomorrow we have a formal photo op with the local media (my Asia dream come true!) and we start our summer training on how to be teachers!

Can't wait to get me one of these babies

Cantonese-style dindin

Taipei

Yilan is very green

View from balcony #2