Sunday was a beautiful sunny day. After church Emily fell asleep for a nap on our bed basking in the warm sunlight coming in massive amounts from our room’s wall of windows. I decided to bicycle down to a big park not far from our home on Taipei’s southwest side and do some reading.

Arriving at the park I continued biking through it looking for a good place. I found it in a bench on the edge of a big area of red dirt with tall, hardwood trees every couple of square-meters or so. The sunlight could still reach me nicely but filtered through the trees. Bright enough to enjoy and dampened enough to make it easy for my eyes to focus on my book’s pages without needing to squint. The area’s purpose seemed to be to give people a comfortable place to walk barefoot on the hard-packed dirt. Except for the trees the dirt was bare.

In the middle of the area was a woman. She was dressed in normal, everyday clothes. Very close to her she had a little push-cart. On the push-cart was a stereo that was playing “Taiwanese exercise music.”

I don’t know what else to call the music. Its very mellow, methodical, and simple. A voice every few seconds alternates between two commands in Chinese which probably mean “up” “down” or something like that. It’s the kind of music that never seems to go anywhere. There are no climaxes, no beginnings, middles, or ends. It just plays with the Chinese voice every second or so alternating commands.

The music is turned up loud enough to be heard in about a 50 meter radius but echoing through the trees its high volume doesn’t hurt your ears no matter how close you are. Scattered around this area of music are people. Men and women, all at least 40-something up to those whose bodies are so weathered from life that one thinks this might be there last Sunday exercise. None of them stand together. They aren’t lined up following the leader. It isn’t a crowd but a gathering of people exercising in unison.

The exercise is like a dance and everyone knows the steps. The Chinese voice says a command and everyone bows forward, sweeping both arms to the right of their body up past their back with a graceful control of fingertips. As they reach their body’s flexible limit in that direction the Chinese voice gives the alternate command and everyone reverses the direction of their arms without any lapse in motion. Timing is perfect. Everyone knows the music and motions well.

One very old lady not far from where I’m sitting is too old to be graceful. She makes all the same motions as everyone else. While everyone else perfectly times their movements so that as they reach the end of one direction they begin their reverse she doesn’t. She begins each movement with a push and thrust. Willing her body to movement she gets her arms and legs going. Instead of fighting momentum to increase grace she embraces it, needs it, to make it to the next exercise.

This is the setting I had for the next few hours while I finish reading Descending From Duty by J. Ryan Fenzel. Life is good.

“Hi,
I am a British university student graduating this year! With the world depression I am finding it hard to find a job next year in the UK! So i was thinking of heading to Taiwan to teach english for a whole year!

Could you tell me what its like living in Tiapei and how much an apartment in the city center would cost?
Also how did you cope with the language barrier

Thanks!!!”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Good questions Kush.

As far as what its like living in Taipei I’m not sure how to answer you since thats a pretty broad question. I would suggest reading blogs. Another good source of information is www.forumosa.com where people write about a ton of different topics on life here. Life is life though so to answer your question in a nutshell I’d say life in Taipei is just like life anywhere else, it is what you make it. Sorry to be so cliche.

Apartment prices really vary. It depends on what you want. We found our apartment on www.tealit.com which is where we do a lot of things. Its a great resource for foreigners in Taiwan.

Prices range on the cheapside at about 5000 NTD if you can find it upwards. Realize that space in Taipei is luxury so what you pay in rent is usually dependent on how much space you get and also has to do with where you live. I’ve found it much cheaper to get a “house” sized apartment and then split it with roommates. If you want to live alone then its hard to find something very big thats affordable.

The language barrier really isn’t hard to deal with. Many Taiwanese young people know English fairly well and many are anxious to practice. This coupled with the friendly and helpful nature of people here makes not knowing Chinese doable. Many restaurants, banks, shops, businesses, have English menus and services so its really not bad at all. Just to give you an example, when I go to Subway to get a sandwich I order in English.

You can definitely live in Taiwan without knowing Chinese just fine. Its also a great place to get employment at a fairly decent rate teaching English. Go for it!

Just wanted to post this news clip before it disappears from the internet forever.

http://ap.ntdtv.com/News/Clip/2009/01/01/66365b0f-db6a-47b1-892c-3413c4e257a4.wmv

Michael and I went on a three-day bike trip over New Year’s break with Sandy, our good Taiwanese friend, and about 50 kids from an orphanage that she volunteers for. This was their third bike trip, the first two being three-week trips around the entire island of Taiwan! They’re absolutely amazing children. We had met them before, last year when we went with Megan to visit Sandy, and thought they were a lot of fun. So when Sandy invited us to come along for the trip, we were excited to say yes!

For those of you who can’t speak Mandarin, here’s a (rough) translation of what’s said in the report:
Lady:
Let’s take a look at this next story, an interesting way to welcome in the New Year – in DouLiu, children from the Sheen-Ee orphanage decided to ride their bicycles to welcome in the new year. Their three-day trip led them from DouLiu to Tainan, covering almost 300 kilometers. Their director, WenHui, told us that this activity really encourages the children.

Voiceover:
Here we go again! On the morning of 2009 New Years Day, at 6 am, before the sun had even started shining, the children from Sheen-Ee orphanage started out on their 3rd bike trip.

Director:
We’ve already done this sort of thing twice before, because our hope is that the kids will believe in themselves. Really, riding bicycles in a group like this is excellent for the kids. And just look at them – it’s so cold outside, but they were still able to get up and get going, and have a good start on the beginning of this journey! This is really not easy. Right now, it’s so early that most everybody else is still inside asleep. But we’ve already gone 5 kilometers before stopping to eat breakfast!

Voiceover:
(Not quite sure what she said)…This woman, Sandy, has already gone on a trip with the orphanage and now joins them for a second time.

Sandy:
Most importantly, I come here to see the kids go from an attitude of “I can’t!” to having confidence and believing in themselves, from not being able to hug me to running up to me on their own initiative, saying “Teacher, you’re here!!” This gives me the ability to take initiative myself.

Voiceover:
(Not quite sure what she said)…Two friends from America, who have come to join the children in their journey.

Emily:
Michael:

Voiceover:
(something)…So, the children from Sheen-Ee Orphanage set out. Jia You! (This literally means add oil (to a fire), but is used to mean “You can do it!)

Pretty cool eh? Come visit us and you can hop along for the ride next time

Emily and I took a bicycle trip last week with our good friend Sandy and some orphanage kids she volunteers with. It was really fun and I’m hoping to put together a video of the footage I took. In the meantime please feel free to enjoy watching yours truly on Taiwan television.

http://ap.ntdtv.com/News/Clip/2009/01/01/66365b0f-db6a-47b1-892c-3413c4e257a4.wmv

I am finishing my third semester as a full-time university student. It has taken a year and a half for me just to enter what I feel is academic-mode. Thats not to say I am really applying myself in school or anything like that. This semester in fact I feel that I have largely been on auto-pilot in terms of school related learning. I’m talking about that mode which includes a desire to read, observe, learn, and  discover coupled with an overall sense that there are things to know and desire to know them.

This school semester has been an aid in that though. My mythology class, upon reflection, seems to have been a major force in catapulting me into academic-mode. Starting this summer and continuing up to the present my desire to read has returned after a long absence. I’ve never been a voracious reader but I remember back in high school enjoying reading and learning through books.

However, while in the professional arena I think I lost that enjoyment and became intrigued and fixated on succeeding at whatever job I had. I saw books not as something to wind down with after work but as objects of education. Therefore I did not turn to them, even fiction, and instead used tv, movies, and video games (marginally) for distraction time. In fact during that professional period I tried to read and found it very difficult. My mind would race and wander halfway through a page making “reading” time a seeming waste as I seemed to gain nothing except frustration over not being able to focus. I did read a fair bit of news during that period though. The sensational, fast-paced, current-event-urgency style of western main-stream journalism made reading news an important task. It was not only easy to read but could be focused on since my goal-oriented mind included it in the tasks I needed to complete to be successful in my job. I was keeping up with the times and loving it.

Last year I had an hour-long commute, one-way to school. This fostered a breakthrough for me that came in the form of Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity which I found in the MCU library and used to fritter away the commute. I found myself reading a book and enjoying it! Not only that but I could focus on it and would look forward to the next opportunity to read in it. In a word, it was wonderful! If this seems strange to you remember that my view of books, which has largely remained unchanged, are that they are educational tools. Even though it was trashy fiction I felt so productive reading it which was coupled with the fact that I enjoyed the story too. Emily and I returned home for the summer and the 4 or 5 (I forget) books that I had started over the past few years without finishing got read through. Not only that but after finishing them I started and finished other books! I kept thinking ‘this is so great! I can read and focus on what I’m reading and actually learn and get joy from it!’

Towards the end of the summer I devised a system: To continue enjoying reading I would limit the educational tool type books to every other at the most and include a fair bit of easy fiction so as not to forget that reading is fun. So far this system has worked and I have continued reading books. I don’t really read that much news anymore though.

Because of this renewed enjoyment of reading coupled with lessons God is teaching me I feel as though I am entering academic-mode. I feel like my “de-tox” from professional-mode is on the closing end for the present with the ratio increasing into academic side with each passing day.

It is easy to see why people never leave academic-mode. Since it is the mode of childhood (at least the mode that modern western society says should be of childhood) now it seems very natural to me to want to continue in it for a lifetime. Something that never appealed to me before. My professional-mode desire to accomplish has been replaced quite adequately with my academic-mode desire to understand.