A few months back the school had a meeting where all the class leaders (you take all your classes with the same group of people and you elect class leaders) met with Ming Chuan University’s president, Dr. Lee, and MCU’s department heads. I went because I am vice-leader of my class. At that meeting one of the International College graduate students suggested that the same type of thing occur for all IC (International College) students to attend and ask questions, voice concerns, etc.

Today was a culmination of that suggestion. The president was good enough to give us a little over an hour of his time. It was quite an interesting meeting. Anyone that likes studying the effects of globalization and cross-cultural communication would have been feverishly taking notes and making analysis.

Basically one of us students would say something, the president would say something very general like how much he cared about our concerns, etc., then the president’s crony who oversaw the stuff that the question or comment was directed at would respond, and then the president would make another general comment about how important we international students are. It was very interesting to hear the different styles of speaking and questions from the students and then hear the styles of responses. One very interesting thing I observed was my Taiwanese classmate, while nervous, asked his question without sugar-coating and then listened to his response from the president looking him straight in the eye. This was interesting because here I would have expected a Taiwanese student to look down at the middle of the president’s body while the president talked to him showing respect and not “challenging” the President’s authority. My classmate must really be fed up with MCU.

I broke the ice with the first question. I asked if the university could have some sort of standard for IC professors in regards to their English proficiency. The president told a story about how, while he was studying for his Ph. D in the United States he had an Indian and also a Pakistani professor who it was very hard to understand. the IC Dean then talked about how all professors have to take English tests to get into their various Ph. D programs so their English was at least at “that” standard. She said that we students should come to our department directors if professors are seriously lacking English ability. We as a class did go to them a few weeks ago about a professor so we’ll see what happens.

All in all I was pleased by the meeting. I was pleased that MCU’s president was making such a public display of his support for international students and communicating to his staff that they had better take care of us or else. I am displeased however as to his expectations of his staff. I believe he understaffs the IC and therefore the staff that is in place cannot get to our needs, even though they’d like to. The IC staff, from what I can see, are hard workers and want to do a good job but simply because they are forced into that place of always dealing with the urgent, the important is put off.

President Lee definitely does care about us. Under his leadership Ming Chuan University has built its International College, one of the first of its kind in Asia. Now MCU is in the middle of the process for receiving accredidation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education in the United States. His words today were something like: ‘we want MCU to be an American university in Taiwan.’ It should be noted at this point that that is perceived to be a good thing and a furthermore a prestigious thing. President Lee correctly pointed out that while many universities around Asia have international colleges, Ming Chuan’s is very diverse in terms of student populations with seventy countries represented. Under his leadership MCU has been very aggressive in recruiting students from all corners of the world.

I believe MCU can, as president Lee said they would, become very reknowned in Asia and throughout the world for a unique, international, college experience. MCU can also miss that mark however. President Lee must now, without dropping recruitment of students completely, shift priorities to building infrastructure, and support mechanisms so that faculty will want to stay on a long-term basis, as well as provide students a college experience that engenders endearment and life-long support for MCU. I fear that if this shift does not happen within the next five years his vision will crumble and other Asian universities will catch up to and pass Ming Chuan in the international student niche.

Even though Christmas isn’t a holiday here and we both had classes as usual we still felt it all around us. Emily decorated our house beautifully and we stumbled across a baptist church out to eat the other night that was decorated to the nines for Christmas and had a Christmas Eve service being loud-speakered along the sidewalk. It was wonderful!!!

Emily and I are doing our celebrations in shifts. Christmas Eve we opened presents, Christmas (today) we’ll go to a friends party, tomorrow (Boxing Day…shout out to Darren) we’ll make ourselves a wonderful Christmas meal, and Saturday we’ll have friends over for our own party.

Darren was kind enough to give me some extremely arromatic Blue Mountain coffee that I am very excited about. Emily gave me some very stylish shirts, a bicycle computer thingy and bicycle gloves, and also a few gadgets for my computer!!!! You’ll have to ask Emily about what she got.

I feel so full emotionally. Emily’s love of Christmas is starting to rub off on me. Its wonderful how God is knitting both of us together as a new family.

Thank you to all of you that sent notes, emails, text-messages, skyping, and everything. Being remembered and loved feels fantastic.

We love and miss you all.

I’ve been thinking about my second family lately. The Pippers took me in and let me live in their basement in exchange for a little babysitting during my year-long, unpaid, internship with Student Statesmanship Institute (SSI). They welcomed me back to sleep on the hide-a-way several times after that whenever I was in town and let me stay back in my old room for another 6 months right before I was married last year. Without a doubt they are a huge part of my life and I miss them.

Dennis is in fact a big reason why this site exists. He, along with Robbia, gave the taiwaneers.com domain to Emily and I as a wedding gift and has been webmastering and hosting this site on his server since it started. A great guy who I always enjoyed talking with, sitting around the kitchen table sipping beer and making wisecracks while the kids were swimming or bouncing on the trampolene. The camping I got to go along with the Pippers on is still with me. Higgins lake with the empty campground, and Luddington! Great times that I wish I could do over.

Robbia was our connection to summer jobs this past summer which was incredibly wonderful, taking the pressure of finding the dough-re-me for the plane tickets off of our shoulders. I cannot forget how her and Dennis included me in the MSU workers/friends cliqe parties, not to mention her own contributions to the beer sipping and wisecracks around the table. I loved those parties, which seems strange to me now since everyone was either married with kids or the kids themselves, and I was the 20 year-old guy who tagged along with the Pippers. For some reason those parties made me feel like I had a group. I was away from home but it was okay because I had a group. I haven’t even mentioned the food. The mushrooms Robbia can make are out of this world (did I mention Dennis’ homemade beef jerky?)….I’ll leave out the entire list of food that I miss from the Pippers because it would just be too long. The kind of hospitality Robbia and Dennis have is amazing. They basically had me over to dinner about a month into my internship, and towards the end of the meal Robbia asked me when I wanted to move in. A few days later I did and I’m so glad.

Abi, when I first met her was only eight years old. Now she’s a beautiful, talented, young lady who can razzle dazzle you with a piano and can make anything from cookies to dinner. She’s a fantastic young woman who loves God and seems to have limitless potential.

Noah, the former six year old now hockey/baseball/everything player, is someone you better not ‘let win’ when it comes to the basketball hoop in the drive way because now he really will beat you! He is definitely special to me. In my own family I’m the younger brother and now I finally have someone that I’m bigger than!!! He’s a great guy.

Emma, that four year old who was so crabby that first night at dinner, having just woke up from a nap, is now so grown up. She is basically a FIREBALL. I never used to understand it when I was younger and adults would describe certain people as FIREBALLS but now I do and Emma is one of them. She such a cool person and doesn’t let being the youngest in the family get in the way of anything.

If I listed out all the ways the Pippers have given to me (like helping at my wedding, giving me shelter, giving me sage counsel when I was hung up on Emily, taking me camping….) we’d be here forever.

I miss them and wish them a Merry Christmas!

PS- Some of you may wonder if this post reflects a bad relationship with my own family. On the contrary, I believe my incredibly good relationship with my natural family has made creating relationships like this one with the Pippers even better and I doubt my natural family will feel hurt or diminished by this post.

I finally put up two new albums, though I took the pictures at least a few weeks ago. Here’s a synopsis:

“Handelbar View” -

Some shots from a Saturday afternoon bike ride a few weeks ago, close to where we live, along the river through town. It’s such a nice strip of parks and riding trails, right though all the bustle of the city. And the day we went was perfect! One of the last of its kind before the colder temperatures fell on us. It’s easy to love Taiwan when you’re riding along, sniffing the clean ocean-esqe river air (the river runs right into the ocean, not far from us), passing joggers, walkers, bikers and anyone else who’s just out to enjoy the day. Michael’s decided to make biking his leisure/exercise activity, and I quite agree with him!

“Adventure at the End of the World” –

A few Fridays ago, I suggested that we go to Ye Liu, a tourist destination that we’d never seen. It’s a seaside town, the attraction being amazingly shaped and rock formations, the most famous of them the Queen’s Head. You guessed it, the rock looks like a lady’s noggin.
We rode our scooter the long way through the misty mountains before finally reaching the seaside, then spent the afternoon and into the evening hiking to the very end of a mountainous (well, hilly) peninsula. It was truly breathtaking beauty and weirdness! The best part was being all alone with the sea mist, blustery wind, age-old rock face and the vast ocean itself. It was easy to imagine myself centuries, even millennia ago, walking the same steps and looking out into the same gray horizon. And then we’d see a boat…
It was truly an adventurous day, topped off by a little spill on the scooter coming home… I can hear my mother gasping right now…! Don’t worry, nothing got hurt. It was wet and raining, and Michael had slowed down to get on a ramp, but didn’t see until we got very close that there was a split in the road. So, we ended up running into those resilient rubber things put there just exactly for people like us, tipped over, and then picked ourselves up. Michael must have asked me 20 times if I was ok! He ended up with a bruise on his leg, but I came away scratch-free! Thank you God!

*** *** ***

Every day continues to be an adventure, and yet I find myself settling into my life here more and more all the time. How is that? I do believe it’s one of God’s less-appreciated miracles.

I didn’t do amazingly on my midterms, so the official kick in the butt has come: I’ve been given a certain amount of time, and must use all of it wisely to be able to say I did my absolute best in everything. Even though I was working hard, I wasn’t applying myself to every end that I am capable, and for that I needed to repent. Of course He forgave me, and not only, that, He gave me a brand new desire to do well for His name. It’s such sweet pleasure to be able to look in any direction and see Christ before me!

And Michael is still the perfect match for me. Of course we need a little alone time once in awhile, but honestly – we just hang out with each other. I don’t really get tired of him, but instead keep finding new things about him to be interested in and love. God has really blessed our marriage and friendship!

Christmas is coming, and I’ve definitely got the itch. Michael told me tonight that I’ve rubbed off on him, making him appreciate the Christmas spirit and my love for it more. hoorah! The other night I cut out a bunch of paper snowflakes, probably for my first time in years, but the windows look pretty now

I love being able to sit back and be reminded, over and over again, about family and good friends, and just how much they mean to me. Something in the glow of the lights on my little tree brings back a flood of good memories – of all of you! Thank you for pouring into my life, both in the past and now…the warmth of your love reaches all the way into my little home in a foreign country. I love you all!

Merry Christmas!!!!

The other day I took the train down to Yilan City. First of all let me say that the train ride was beautiful. As you can see from that map the train goes right along the coast for a ways. I love the ocean and seeing it again made me remember it all over.

I met up with the girl who was selling me the bike outside the train station. I gave the bike a test ride, we talked a little bit, and then I gave her my money and she took off.

She had suggested I take a bus back to Taipei since they can cut through the mountain using a tunnel slicing my traveling time in half. I went over to the bus station to make an inquiry. The dude behind the counter wasn’t too good at English and my Chinese still isn’t that great. He seemed to indicate I needed to take the front wheel off my bike and put it in a garbage bag to be able to load it onto the bus. When I tried to explain that I didn’t have the necessary tool to do so he told me that the bus was “all full.” When I asked him when the next bus would go to Taipei he told me 11:30pm. “Really?” I asked him since Taipei is a pretty hot destination and it was only 4:00pm at the time. He said yes that was indeed the case. I don’t know but I suspect he figured I was too much hassle so it would be best to just get rid of me. I guess I’ll never know the truth.

I went back over to the train station and went to the window to buy a ticket for me and my bike. “eega ren hu eega bi she cal zai Taipei” I told the man which means ‘1 person and 1 bicycle to Taipei.” He kind of hesitated at first not knowing what to do about the bicycle but then asked me if 6:55pm would be okay. Even though that was 2 hours later which would mean I’d have to bum around Yilan for a while I just decided that I was lucky to be going back to Taipei at all and said okay. He sold me two tickets (1 for me and 1 for the bike) on the slow train back to Taipei for 6:55pm which was about $8 USD or so. After taking the tickets I called Emily to tell her how long I’d be.

To kill time I decided to try out my new bicycle and see a little bit of Yilan. There were rice fields everywhere. You could look out at a whole bunch of rice fields and see a house in the midde of it and a few roads going through them. It was weird because rice fields are basically like ponds with little walls protruding about a foot up around the edges. Buildings in the middle of a bunch of them look so lonely and solitary since Taiwanese construction normally means every house and building mashed up against the sides of those beside it.

I loved my new bike. Smooth, easy, pretty, and the ten-speed style I had wanted. God is so good to me! Then all of a sudden the back tire went flat.

I walked the bike back towards the train station and decided to study in the McDonald’s close by it. After finishing dinner I got out my Classical Myth by Barry Powell textbook and started on the Trojan War.

Next to me was a high school girl and guy studying. After about 30 minutes they finally got up the nerve to all of a sudden pass me a slip of paper with “Where are you from?” written on it saying a hasty “excuse me.” I read the paper and told them I was from America. For the next hour or so I would study a little bit and every once in a while answer a few of their questions. The boy always did the talking and the girl always would turn her head away and give one of those embarrassed laughs while he did so.

After discussing what my favorite basketball team was and getting the foundation of Helen & Paris’ elopment covered I got ready to leave and asked the two high schoolers if they knew of a bike shop nearby so that I could fix my tire. I was surprised when they immediately packed up there stuff and took me around the corner to a scooter store where they asked the guy if he would patch the inner tube in my bike tire. He was so slow. A middle aged Taiwanese guy who before we came along was peacefully watching tv now tried to patch my inner tube. While I stood there worried I would miss my train he moved as deliberately as possible. Taking out the tube, rubbing some goop on the hole, blowing on it to dry to goop, putting a patch on top of that, putting some air in it, and then sticking it in a bucket of water to see if the hole made bubbles indicating a leak. The two high schoolers stayed right there with me nodding reassuringly at me and trying to speed him up.

Before it was fixed I decided I better be off. I gave him 50NT (about $2 USD) for his trouble, grabbed the bike and set off for the train station. Looking behind me I saw the high schoolers still right there. They walked with me down to the train station. Then when the ticket taker became unsure about the bike they went with me down to the package guy. He explained that bikes aren’t people and I was going on a people train back to Taipei and that I needed to go to the ticket window. As a rush of worry and tension seized me I told him ‘I know but that the dude at the window had sold me these tickets and told me to ride the 6:55pm back to Taipei in the last car.’ He looked at some paperwork or something and then all of a sudden said “oh yes, okay. I’ll talk to the train conductor for you.”

As I, my bike, the two high schoolers, and now this package guy walked out to the platform down to where the last car of the 6:55pm train was pulling up I was relieved. The package guy talked to the conductor, I hopped on the train and leaned my bike up against some empty seats and sat down next to it. The high schoolers tapped on my window. I turned around and waved goodbye to them as the train pulled away and then after noticing strange looks from those sitting around at me and my bike I popped in my headphones and sat back to listen to Viva La Vida.

This is only one of the myriad of stories like it. Whats the moral? You can live in another country and get by just fine, even if you don’t speak the language very well. You can even find good deals and bikes! You just have to be prepared for mistunderstandings, long waits, and expect everything to be more of a hassle than back home.