Im Osten viel Neues!

Ni hau!

Wow, almost a week has passed since I left Germany and I am overwhelmed with all the things I've seen, done, experienced and encountered. It'll be hard to write this first note from Taiwan, but I'll try not to ramble around too much...

Flying to Taiwan take-a-me long time! From Frankfurt to Taipei was a 13-hour non-stop flight! Check out the picture below, we're just about to enter Uzbekistan. Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Southeast China and Taiwan were still to come.


Before changing planes to Kao-Hsiung, we decided to take a first group picture. Oh my god, we had no idea how many there were still to come... Taiwanese are crazy for group pictures, it seems...


We were picked up at the airport by bus and went on to Tainan, the former capital of Taiwan, to meet with our local guides and contacts at the Coastal Ocean Monitoring Center at National Cheng Kung University. But if you think we were able to take a break, you're mistaken. First item on the to-do-list: Go out for lunch!


This picture IS representative of what the whole city is like, by the way.
Below, our "Mensa" food - and someone chose a very unfancy dish for me, there were much cooler things to choose from! But the menu was written in Chinese, so what can I do?


If you're like me, you won't like airplane bathrooms. If you're going to Taiwan and you're in need of a toilet, rather use the airplane one, cause it just doesn't pay off to wait...


After lunch and everything, we had a short introductory meeting with subSsequent showers for everyone. Yes, showers! Thank god for the airconditioning in my room. 29°C at 6am and 35°C at 2pm are common. The 18°C (at least they feel like it) inside buildings will kill you, if you don't carry a sweater or light jacket, so don't forget to bring one...
Streets are nuts in Taiwan. The drive from Kao-Hsiung to Tainan seemed as if we had never left the city and there's signs everywhere. Another striking feature is that houses seem a bit dilapitated. Almost all buildings do, but not the temples.



The next day, we had our first day of language training. Chinese is hard. It's the pronunciation and the fact that even if you write the Pinying signs instead of the traditional runes, it's just unintuitive for Westerners. But you get a hang of it, if you practice. I'll do my best to try and at least get by after 2 months. After a full day of language training and more introductory meetings, we went out for dinner. The place offered a huge selection of fresh fish and frog legs and rooster testacles. I had lots of all the dishes we ordered, but we didn't order the testacles - I chickened out. Going to a restaurant is cool in Taiwan, because you always share your meals. Usually you have to be at least 10 people. You order, say, 15 dishes which are placed in the center of a round table on a revolving platter, so that everybody can reach every dish. It's awesome! And the best thing is: Even the greatest seafood, essentially all-you-can-eat style, will only be about 300 NTD. That divided by 45 (I don't do math.) is the amount in Euros.


After dinner, we went out to a night market. Little did I know that the main attraction, as almost everywhere in Taiwan apparently, was food!


If you look close enough, you will see some Taiwanese girls with Desert Eagles...


(In this case that was Naomi, a friend of my buddy Dominik from Göttingen, who was our tour guide that night)

The next day, we had to get up at 6.30 am again and went out for a tour of central Taiwan. We visited a bunch of places, Nippon style. Half an hour in each spot. The 2 hour bus ride was abbreviated by means of KARAOKE, of course!


We visited a dam which was rather pathetic, because there has been so little rain lately that there was hardly any water to dam, a temple which was damaged in an earthquake and a town which featured an earthquake-damaged-but-rebuilt trainstation. The unfortunate thing about the trip was that there was not really information as to why we were going to a certain place of what there is to do. Instead we were dropped off in this town with the comment: You can rent bikes here... So we just walked around, sweated a whole lot and, guess what: had food.



Afterwards, we went to a cool pottery place which has been known for pottery for a long time, by Taiwanese standards. Sorry, no dates here. This is what it looked like from the inside.


They even made large pots for Japanese soldiers to hide in during WWII. The toilets there were cool, but since I've already posted a picture of one, I'll only include the sign here, hehehe...


A huge thunderstorm barred us from exploring the site further, so we actually did: "Abwarten und Tee trinken." Tea in Taiwan is delicious! But more of that later. I'll report more about yesterday's and today's adventures tomorrow, or whenever I find the time to.

As you can probably tell, I like it here. It's super awesome to experience something so entirely different. Especially the food makes a difference. It's just unavoidable. And sometimes the thought of some German bread and cheese or ham makes me miss home a little bit. But hey, that's not what I came here for, so tastebuds, prepare!

By the way, just one more week until Miranda will come to Taipei!!! Yay, Baby, I love you!

Shower, Karaoke, sleep, Chinese... argh! Gotta run... oh... and there's a Taiphoon approaching, I heard today, I'll have to look into that some time...