Living vs. Adjusting

I took the train by myself today!!!!! 我今天單獨去候車!!!!!

I spent the day at Chinese classes with the other exchange students, where we had our first dance class – the instructor tried to teach the girls how to be sexy and the boys how to be “powerful”. Almost all of us have no experience dancing, and we awkwardly imitated the complicated steps of a dance we’ll have to perform in front of hundreds of Rotarians in April.

Afterwards, we planned to go to the night market, but since my curfew is earlier than most students’ I took an earlier train home. And I managed! Normally when we travel as a group, I take a backseat and follow the crowd, since others always seem to know where we’re going. That might not be the best idea. We’ve gotten lost twice already, and yesterday we had to spend almost an hour looking for a very sketchy train station in the farmlands of Miaoli – but we made it home alright, so, no real harm done. And now I can say I’ve been to Nanshi! Unless you like chickens, there isn’t much to see there.

       My dad went to parent teacher interviews this week, and apparently my teacher said she wants to invite me over for barbeque sometime. When he told me this later, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Going over to your teacher’s house? In Canada, that would be miles and miles past the line of appropriate student-teacher interactions. But here my classmates call their teachers by their first name, and talk to them about their personal lives almost more than they talk about school.

       In an attempt to adapt to this cultural difference, I asked my teacher, Yulun, about her book. We managed to carry on a conversation about our shared love of reading, and later that day she gave me some children’s books I can use to practice Chinese. (Thanks, Yulun!)

Yulun also spend a long time explaining that on October 30^th, my class will participate in a play about environmental protection. My role is to be a bad student and throw trash everywhere. I think she said the trash is not provided – so I should bring my own trash to this event (time to start collecting?). All I know for sure is that she will drive me to the play on her motorcycle, which is something I am definitely excited about, as riding a Taiwanese motorcycle became one of my goals the day I got here.

As an added challenge to this goal, Rotary says exchange students are not allowed to ride motorcycles – yet it’s only ever Rotarians that I see offering us rides. I think Rotary here has a lot of rules that are taken as suggestions, because the day after they told me I’m not allowed to ride a bike, my host mom told me to ride a bike (and she’s the District Chair). My teacher said she spoke to my mom about the arrangements for this play, so I’m in the clear and can look forward to finally riding a motorcycle on the busy streets of Taiwan!!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been strategically changing all my classes so that all I do at school is cook and learn how to make a flower out of a hair braid. I’m almost there – right now I’m taking Western cooking, Chinese cooking, baking, hair styling, English, sports, and computer class.

After 3 weeks, I’ve made visible progress on my flower braid, and they’ve started entrusting me with more difficult steps in cooking class (except in the last class, my job was to crack the eggs, and I accidentally broke one all over the table because I missed the side of the bowl. Oops)! But you know when you get stir-fry, they make your vegetables dance around in a big pan, and fire goes everywhere? I learned how to do that!! I think I need to build up my arm muscles to be able to do it properly – professionally stir-fryers always make it look so effortless, but the pan is actually really heavy.

September always seems to be the most popular month for birthdays, and in keeping with this trend, I went to my friend Luiza from Brazil’s birthday party on Tuesday, the night market for another two students’ birthdays today, and we celebrated my dad’s birthday – along with another Rotarians birthday and my third host dad’s birthday – at a fancy restaurant on Sunday. At the restaurant, a large tub of frogs hopped around merrily, right next to the diners, many of whom were eating frog legs. (That’s as fresh as it gets, I guess). The Rotarians asked me if I wanted to order frog but I said I’d pass – I want to be open to trying as many foods as I can, but eating a frog while its frog friends hop around beside me is just over the line. Luckily, I think they were joking anyway.

       Instead, we ate a wide variety of foods that I didn’t recognize. My strategy of eat first, ask later worked in my favor once I learned the many of the dishes were organs that I’ve never considered eating (really, I shouldn’t have been surprised after eating chicken’s heart). None of the food tasted bad, but all of it tasted different, and most of it was not bad but not good enough to want to eat again. I’ll keep trying everything I can, though, and maybe I’ll stumble across a delicacy in a food I’ve never dreamed of eating.

Another cultural difference I’m slowly becoming accustomed to is this: when going out for dinner, the adults will ask me what I want to eat, and then order me something completely different. One time my host mom let me write down my order myself – in most restaurants here, you write down what you want on the menu – and then promptly crossed it out and ordered me something else. Another time, a Rotarian asked me, “What do you want to eat?” I said rice vegetables, and she shook her head and said, “No good (bu hao).” I randomly picked 4 dishes off the menu that were all “No good”, until she gave up and ordered for me.

Taiwanese food is amazing except for the interesting organs, so I have no reason to complain – but why do they bother asking? Sometimes they even go through the trouble of getting me an English menu or explaining what each dish is – only to choose for me. My exchange student friends have mentioned this happening to them, too. Maybe they want to give us the illusion of choice? Who knows? If anyone familiar with Taiwanese culture want to explain this to me, that’d be much appreciated.

I visited an Oil Museum last weekend, and had a good time trying to decipher both the Chinese and English displays. Many stores and museums here have English translations below the Chinese descriptions. As a native English speaker, sometimes it’s almost harder to understand the English translations, because in Taiwan, close enough is often good enough – and as a result you can find restaurants called “Bee Fnoodles”, with suspicious menus boasting of “delicious things” that neglect to mention what those delicious things are. (Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of a menu?)

This week is the first week that I’ve felt like I’m living a life here, rather than just adjusting to life here. Coincidentally, this week I also received my Resident card!! I’m excited for this new stage in the journey and can’t wait to see what’s to come. If you are considering becoming an exchange student, just imagine me yelling at you from across the world, “Go for it!”. There is nothing else like exchange, and I can’t imagine where I’d be if I wasn’t here – I can’t imagine who I’d be if I wasn’t here. Rotary Youth Exchange is guiding me and helping me grow into a person I can’t wait to be, and I can’t believe how much this experience has changed me already. I am so thankful to my family, my sponsoring Rotary Club of Mississauga West, District 7080, my host Rotary Club of Miaoli Central, and the person I was a year ago, who threw everything she had into applying for exchange.

~ Serena