Settling in?

It’s the end of my second day in Taiwan, but so much has happened that it feels like I’ve been here for much longer. Yet there’s also still so much that I don’t know, and that I need to sort out, so it also feels like I’ve hardly managed to get my feet wet. Overall, I’m not even sure where to begin. My first impressions are that this was an excellent decision and such a great opportunity. I’ve had some minor snaffoos but also feel like I am well on my way to having a good and productive time here. I’ve met a lot of people, applied for a resident visa, found an apartment to live in for at least the next month, read a bunch of papers and have an exciting direction to start on research. Still much to figure out – everything from where to buy toilet paper and what to do with trash and also actually making friends – but definitely getting started! I have found everyone here really is nice and accommodating: for example, the taxi driver who helped me take my luggage from my hotel to the apartment was really sweet and undercharged me. I only wish I had made him take the extra money, but it still feels like my reactions to everything that is going on are a little bit slow. I’ll just have to look for some opportunities to pay the kindness forward, I suppose. Tomorrow and the day after are meetings with the rest of the Fulbrighters. I’m looking forward to it, but also looking forward to next week when I can actually get down to work.

Intro

Here’s to my first post of what will hopefully be a collection (although my previous experience in writing blogs— or any other journals — has proven that I am not the most reliable). I’m starting this to record some of the experiences of my ten month stay in Taiwan starting tomorrow (sort of – with the time difference and traveling, I actually won’t arrive in Taipei until what will be September 5). What will I be doing during that time? To be honest, I actually don’t have a solid answer for that. I can tell you what I would like to be doing: I received a Fulbright student grant to do research on the environmental impact of organic and regular high mountain tea farming and I wrote the proposal because I think I’d like to be doing just that. I imagine it would be like this: plenty of days out hiking around beautiful, misty tea farms, learning about tea agriculture, taking breaks to sample and discuss tea culture and spending some time in labs learning cool new lab techniques. But I am also approaching this experience openly, considering that I have a lot to learn about Taiwan, tea farming and analytical lab techniques, it’s entirely possible that the three don’t mix well, or that there will be other reasons why this idea doesn’t pan out. So instead, I am going with broader goals to learn as much about Taiwan and environmental science research that is going on there (and elsewhere) as I can. If it turns out that I can swing this to include tea farming – great. If not, I hope that I can find other projects that are fruitful instead. I’ve been talking to biogeochemistry researchers at Academia Sinica and National Taiwan Normal University and I plan to explore the projects that they are working on as well as the feasibility of the tea plantation research that I want to do. On top of that, I hope to learn a lot about Taiwan, make friends with Taiwanese people, take my mandarin to a whole new level of fluency and usefulness, and travel around the country to see the beautiful things that I’ve heard about it. I’m really excited, but also nervous because there are still so many unknowns. I spent a lot of time stressing out about what I will be doing and how I will do it and where I will do it and when and… getting very worried while trying to plan for things that I don’t really have a feel for. However, I have also been assured countless times that Taiwanese people are friendly, and that the food is good. How, then, can I go wrong?