I haven’t been blogging much this year. It’s been a busy past semester and an even busier past week or so.
Last week, I landed back at the Taoyuan Airport. It was a botched connection on Delta’s part, so we ended up getting moved to EVA Air flight that arrived here at about 5 AM last Friday. We then had an entire day to go after that, so that was a little bit tiring. But it was a good introduction.
The lab is a lot bigger now than it was in the fall. Most of the new people here are interns, so most of us are in similar situations (getting paid by TEEP, which doesn’t pay that much).
I came with a few friends, so I wanted to find apartments for all of us to try to make the living situation more comfortable. The apartment I found was on 591, and I secured it at the beginning of April. I kind of sped through the process of searching, applying, and paying, which probably wasn’t the smartest decision in retrospect.
Now that we’re all here, getting paid, and living in the apartment, we realize that it’s too expensive for all of us, and we’re already trying to get out of our lease and find another place to live (optimally, another apartment, but dorms are okay too).
That is a little bit stressful. I feel like I’ve been spending a little bit too much money lately in general. Ever since I’ve been paid by IIPP last fall, I kind of lost a lot of sense of frugality that I might have used to have had.
In our current apartment, the agent fee is about the same as the rent itself as set by the landlord. Reading over the terms of the lease again, I can’t help but feel like I got ripped off. And it makes sense that, being as stressed as I was looking for housing and how stressed I was in general during the semester, that I missed out on a lot of the details here. It makes me feel a little bit dumb.
Overall, getting back into the rhythm of how I was living in the fall (with the complications of having friends here and trying to rent an apartment) has me kind of looking to the future again. This past week, I told one of my friends in Taipei that I would go to his graduation. He told me it would be on “Saturday”, and the whole conversation I’d assumed he meant this Saturday. Yesterday, I went up to Taipei and went to the campus of the university, only to see a sign advertising it for next Saturday.
One of my friends who came here with me insisted on going up to Taoyuan to buy a SIM card from a particular vendor at the airport, though, which happened to be the same day, so he just finished the journey up and we met and I showed him around some places that I knew. I asked the friend who I would’ve met up with that day for dinner recommendations that evening, and he told me about a yakiniku place by Zhongxiao East Rd. It was excellent. So overall, it was still a worthwhile experience.
Taipei, overall, has grown on me over time. I feel like I somehow remember the positives there more than I remember the negatives, which doesn’t happen often these days.
It’s a cool city. Especially riding the bus down to Wenshan, you get a lot of nice mountain views, and the people in Taipei are more welcoming to Westerners than the people in Wufeng (for the most part).
That reminded me of a text that one of my professors sent me in the morning a few days ago. I know two professors at my home university reasonably well that happen to be Taiwanese, and both of them will be here within a month or so for various reasons. Me and my two friends have been planning to meet up with them when they do come here. At the beginning of this past semester, when asking me what I did here the fall, when I responded that it was research-related she offered to share with me some contacts at universities in Taipei that might be helpful. I thought that was a nice offer. I hope something can come from it.
Not to say that I don’t love Taichung, but maybe that I have too many mental associations with it now and that I’ve maybe done too much “learning” and “making mistakes” here. Maybe I’m kind of embarrassed to show my face in some parts… (I’m one to fall victim to all sorts of irrational fears).
I’m hoping that I can keep coming back in the future, but I’d like to try somewhere and something new whenever that is. I also want to leave on a high note from Taichung.
I can read back on the blog posts that I wrote last fall and I can just feel all of the learning that I’ve done. Some of it sounds stupid, some of it I don’t fully remember, but overall, I feel like this experience has been, and continues to be, worth it.
I definitely haven’t exhausted Taichung’s enormous cafe scene yet, though. Right now, I’m at one that I was recommended by a friend at the beginning of the past semester. He went with our class group in May and stayed afterward to visit a few other cities. From what I gathered, going to this cafe was the only thing he did in Taichung, a city he said was too boring.
He’s not the first person I’ve met who’s gotten that impression, but to be honest, I don’t really understand why people think Taichung isn’t an interesting place. I’ve, personally, found staring that this card next to my coffee wondering if “brandy soak” means it’s alcoholic or not extremely interesting for the past fifteen minutes or so.
At least I’m enjoying it and the music they’re playing in the background here.
I’m probably going to take some time before I head back to my apartment to see the park that the cafe is in and to try to relax myself a little bit. I’ve had a little headache all day. At least I got a chance to update my blog, though. This is nice.
Thank you for the read, again!