Japan, Part 2

In the interest of catching up on this blog, I’m going to blitz through the rest of my Japan experience pretty quickly in a timeline sort of fashion. Starting with Day 2 in Tokyo. Here we go.

On Monday I had some unfinished business to attend to, so I headed back to the famous Tsukiji Fish Market first thing in the morning. Lonely Planet recommends that you get there between 5am and 8am to see the wildest action, where fish distributors both large and small do battle over the world’s freshest catch. The market (right) is apparently filled with buyers and sellers screaming at the top of their lungs, throwing fish, cutting fish, and walking around in giant rubber boots and outfits like the guys on Deadliest Catch. As a morning-challenged person, I arrived at about 10am, and mostly saw the packaging and cleaning phase, but it was still interesting. In order to avoid being lame and eating a bag of chips, I bought a fresh squid cake, which ended up being pretty tasty.

As I still didn’t know where in Japan I would be on the following day, I went to Tokyo Station where I bought some bullet train tickets to Kyoto.

Later, I went for a walk from my hotel through the bustling district of Roppongi, which has seen much of

the high-tech development in the last few years. I went to the top of the Mori Tower (right), where there is an awesome observatory and an impressive modern art museum, which was showing a French exhibition at the time. Sometimes I’m into modern art and sometimes I’m not, but for whatever reason I found this exhibit to be pretty awesome.

From there I decided to go for a long walk over to the west side of town, to see the bright lights/tall buildings shopping district of Shinjuku. On the main drags there were many of the same big chain stores

that I saw around the rest of Japan, but down the back alleyways were the unique, 12 or 15-seater bars and restaurants that may be the enduring Tokyo image for me. I’ll also add that the nightlife in Tokyo, especially Shinjuku, looked pretty wild. As I was there alone, I wasn’t comfortable truly partaking in any of it, so a big goal of mine is to come back with friends and with more money and see that part of the city, because it seems like quite a big deal.

In terms of twenty-somethings and their culture, I have to say that Japan may be the coolest country I've ever been to. Kids my age are well dressed, are into cool music, and like sports. Walking down the street I heard lots of awful, cookie-cutter Japanese pop music (J-pop), but just as frequently I heard stores blasting the new albums by British rockers Arctic Monkeys or indie darlings Foster The People. I blame younger Japanese for the rise of unforgivable girl-band acts; the hottest new "artist" when I was in Japan was a

solo female vocalist going by the inexplicable name of "Milky Bunny."

Usually I find that with cool places (and often with people too), you don’t realize quite how much you love them until much later, after they've “digested.” Kyoto was one of those rare cases where I've loved a city from the very beginning.

While Tokyo is the financial and modern cultural capital of Japan, Kyoto is the old-school cultural heart. Often called the ‘most beautiful city in Asia,’ Kyoto is home to the temples, shrines, pagodas, rock gardens, and distinct scenes that you often envision when you think of classical Japan. I won’t bore you by listing all of the temples and shrines I biked to (yes, I rented a bike, it’s a great biking city), because pictures do better than words to express the unique beauty of each.

After staying in a single hotel room in Japan and not getting to meet too many new people, I decided that I would stay at a guesthouse in Kyoto where I would actually get to chat with people and learn about Japan beyond my walks and my Lonely Planet guidebook. Oh, what a fantastic decision it was. The “Roujiya” guesthouse was absolutely fantastic, partly due to the cool guests and the unbelievably spotless and new accommodations, but mostly because of the young couple that owns it. Naoya and Kaori (right), a pair of businesspeople who got sick of the daily office grind, quit, and started their own guesthouse, are absolute gems. They spoke great English and essentially took me under their wings during my time in Kyoto. I probably owe much of my love for the city to them.

We went out to a bar with some of the other guests on one night, where they taught me some Japanese and we mingled with other fascinated customers at a bar whose curious theme was canned food (it was, creatively, called “Mr. Can’s”). It was probably my favorite night in Japan.

I happened to be in Kyoto at the best time of the year. The Gion (gee-OWN) festival was started in 869 AD to ward off bad spirits from the city (it was actually the plague). Wealthy families or clans from across the city built mobile shrines (essentially, massive floats) that were then paraded through the city to the sounds of odd flute and drum bands. Kyoto has held the Gion festival in the neighborhood of the same name in EVERY year since… ready?... NINE HUNDRED SIXTY. This was definitely the oldest and most historic annual event I’d ever attended. The energy in the street was palpable, as thousands of Kyotoites took pictures of the floats, bought interesting foods, and wore their best traditional garb. It was an awesome, overwhelming sight, especially when the floats were lit up with their dozens of traditional Japanese lanterns.

On my last night in town I met up with Naoya at the festival, and we grabbed a traditional Sashimi dinner afterwards. I mentioned in my last blog post how big a risk this was for me, the non-fish eater. In true Japanese style, we had to take our shoes off and sat on the floor. Nao and I had a lot of fun chatting about Japan, and I ended up in hysterics as he rattled off tales about his years as a twenty-something wandering through Australia and South America, particularly his spells as a professional banana picker and a cross-border used car trafficker.

The Japanese temples and shrines have an unparalleled calm about them that their Chinese counterparts just don’t. They’re invariably quiet, and you usually have to take your shoes off; the smooth wooden floors feel good on your feet, especially after a day of biking. The wood & paper structures have a distinct and awesome aroma. I can see why ancient thinkers and religious men used to sit in these structures for years at a time doing little but contemplating life. Sometimes I wanted to do the same.

I met people from all over the world while touring the temples. I had lunch with a native Brazilian turned Londoner named Fabs, busted out some Spanish with a family of six from Madrid, learned about the Gion festival from a Canadian English teacher, and discussed the finer points of temple etiquette with a French lawyer who had retired to study the ancient art of Japanese flower arranging. The travelers you meet in a place like Kyoto aren’t like the Americans you meet everywhere you turn in Paris or Rome; these are the cool, often strange people that are risk takers and have some pretty interesting experiences. And for the record, it felt pretty cool to use English, Spanish, and Chinese for extended conversations all in the same day.

Nao and Kaori said that their business is still reeling from the disastrous earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown that rocked Japan in March 2011. The only indication I saw during my entire trip that something wasn’t right was that often some electronic machines in public places were turned off to conserve energy in a stressed power grid. For example, most moving sidewalks in the airport were turned off, and several automated ticket vendors in each subway station were inactive.

Nao and Kaori reported, however, that international tourism is at an all-time low, and it’s crippling businesses. Business at the Guesthouse Roujiya was 70% foreigners/30% Japanese before the disaster, but has been 80% Japanese since. Selfishly (and I don’t want to act like anything good came out of this horrible disaster), the temples and historic sights were much emptier than normal, which made for some pretty cool, pensive moments.

Anyways, my point is that if you’re interested, you should go to Japan. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place, with some of the friendliest people I’ve met. And everything is just fine. I promise.

I headed back to Tokyo on Friday afternoon in preparation for my Saturday flight. I decided to scalp a single ticket at the famed Tokyo Dome to see Japan’s best-known and most popular baseball team: the Yomiuri Giants. The Giants are like the Yankees of Japan; they always win because they have the most money, their fans are reportedly obnoxious and awful, and everyone else in the country hates their guts (sorry, was that harsh?). Former Yankee Hideki Matsui played for the Giants before making the move to America.

When I told Naoya in Kyoto that I had planned to go to a Giants game, he said something in Japanese that Kaori translated as "Go to hell, Giants."

Baseball is huge in Japan, so the atmosphere at the Tokyo Dome was pretty wild for the crosstown battle against the Yakult Swallows. I sat in the upper deck between some Japanese teenagers with very little English, and an older Korean gentleman who spoke some Chinese. The game itself was extremely boring, but the environment was pretty hilarious. As in European soccer and American college hockey, there were loud home and away supporters sections. The outfield was split in two, and housed the wildest fans, essentially “student sections.” The opposing sections sang and chanted at each other through the entire game, waving flags and playing trumpets and drums. They had unique songs for each batter, and traded chanted barbs that no doubt are funnier if you speak Japanese.

Before the game and between innings, fans were treated to performances by a curious set of cheerleaders and dancers that ran out on the field wearing what can only be described as Pippi Longstockings outfits. They were accompanied by an incredible number of Giants mascots, probably six or seven (the Giants logo features an orange bug, looking somewhat like a two-eyed rendition of the Spongebob Squarepants character Plankton). And, inexplicably but perhaps predictably, a number of people dressed as Pokemon. Oh, Japan.

The beer vendors at the Giants game were invariably beautiful girls in their early twenties who, like dancers at a recital, were forced to wear ridiculously happy smiles through every second of the game. Which was made all the more impressive by the fact that they carried not bottles or cans of beer, but entire kegs of beer on their backs, which they emptied into little cups.

One of the funniest moments was when the Giants introduced a pinch hitter in the eighth inning, whom I realized must have been one of their better players. All of a sudden, thousands of fans (not just children) whipped out little hand puppets of orange fish wearing Giants jerseys, waving them in the air as the crowd stood and screamed a slow but powerful chant of the batter’s name: O-GA-SA-WA-RA! O-GA-SA-WA-RA!

He struck out and the Giants lost, 2-1.

Japan: An Introduction

Japan.

Tokyo.

To come here, any excuse will do.

One of my favorite TV shows is “No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain,” a travel show where Bourdain, a kind of hardass, 50-something former chef and a recovered coke-addict, travels to cool places around the globe and does the off-the-beaten path stuff. He began his Tokyo show with the above lines; pretty high praise from a guy who doesn’t always heap it on his destinations.

He’s right. I think I first became obsessed with big cities in the year 2000, when my family and I took a vacation to New York. I was 11, and I remember being completely enamored by the energy, the subway, the people hustling to work, the sheer, overwhelming massiveness of it all. Soon, in school, I learned that the biggest city in the world was called Tokyo, but it was both impossibly far away and impossibly foreign. Maybe as a businessman, someday, I thought I’d make it to Tokyo.

I’m so fortunate, at 22, to report that I’ve seen Tokyo, and it is fantastic.

In Bourdain’s Tokyo episode, he said that most people think of Japan in one of two ways: as a frantic, technology-driven, densely packed set of islands, full of massive cities and energetic people with often odd obsessions (see: anime), OR as the quaint nation of centuries past, with peaceful temples, pagodas, quiet rock gardens and babbling brooks. The thing is, it’s both. Both nations, in fact, can be found within Tokyo itself.

After spending a night in Taipei and flying to Tokyo on the morning of Saturday, July 9, I began the unenviable task of navigating this expansive metropolis’ commuter rail and subway system, with just ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ in my Japanese language arsenal. Four hours and many wrong trains later, I arrived at my hotel a sweaty, soaking mess. I had assumed that, as a world-class mega-city, there would be plenty of English, both written and spoken. I was quite wrong.

I would say that including Tokyo, I’ve been to 5 cities that I would call “Class 1 Ultra Mega-cities,” places that are so ridiculously large and complex that it would take a lifetime to explore and completely know. They are: New York, London, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo, with Paris just on the outside. The next level, “Class 2 Freaking Huge cities” are places that are ridiculously huge, but given a week or two I think I could figure them out. I’ll put Chicago, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Rome in that category. If you visit any of the other cities in the first group, there’s plenty of English; they are giant melting pots, with thousands of people of all different nationalities (NY, London, and Hong Kong the most so, Beijing the least). Those cities don’t just belong to their respective countries, they truly belong to the world.

Tokyo, on the other hand, is without a doubt 100% Japanese. Not many people speak English, and there’s far less written English than almost anywhere I visited in China.

I found this pretty strange. Americans usually think of Japan as more sophisticated than China, as it’s a more-developed nation with a huge economy, stable government, and generally good international relations, especially with the west. China, on the other hand, was essentially completely isolated from the rest of the world until well into the seventies, and is a country famously resistant to outside influence. Yet there’s boatloads more English in China than in Japan. Odd.

Sunday was my first full day in Tokyo. After a failed mission to Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market (it was closed on Sunday, of course), I set out for a sure-fire Japanese experience: the renowned Senso-Ji Temple in the city district of Asakusa (uh-SOCK-uh-suh). It was hot and muggy as I made my way through a throng of bustling Japanese in the so called “Asakusa Shopping Street,” a too-narrow road filled with shops and stands, leading towards the towering gated entryway to the temple. I noticed about half of the women I saw carrying frilly umbrellas, and more wearing Allen Iverson-style sleeves on their

forearms, in attempts to keep their fair skin untouched by the brutal sun.

The temple (right) itself was a wild, swirling mass of activity. Pilgrims fought their way up the stairs and into the

main temple, where they tossed coins, lit incense, and bowed in prayer. It’s interesting to notice that most Buddhist temples in Japan prominently feature the symbol known in the western world as a swastika, which was a religious icon for centuries before the Nazis stole it and made it their own.

I like to think that I’m a relatively knowledgeable person when it comes to topics like music, sports, travel, and current events. One of my many, many flaws, however, is my general indifference towards food. I admire people who like good food, who know about good food. I’ve just never been one of them. That having been said, I sampled some local fare here in Japan: buckwheat-made soba noodles, various Udon dishes, and a one-night explosion in Kyoto in which I ate massive quantity of sashimi to impress my hosts. Please don’t underestimate what a massive departure this was for me. In my life, I probably have had seafood less than 20 times, and most of that was, like, fried fish sticks and popcorn shrimp. So downing copious quantities of strange, raw fish (especially in what I like to call an ‘away toilet situation’) was a big step for me. I survived. And I am not ashamed whatsoever to report that on my trip to Japan I had both McDonald’s and KFC, and that a portion of this blog entry was written in a Sbarro.

Over the last several years it has been a favorite pastime for me and my Asia-based friends to debate which east Asian nation has the best looking girls. With all due respect to my lovely friends from China, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam, I’m sorry, but the debate is over.

Moving on.

From the temple at Asakusa I made my way to the sprawling Imperial Palace, at the city’s center, where

the ancient city of Edo once stood. The vast majority of the complex is closed to the public and is the year round residence of the Emperor and his family. Apparently the royals are mostly involved in tabloid fodder, not

unlike their British counterparts. The walled palace complex is surrounded by a massive park, filled with bicycles racing alongside a large moat. Certain portions of my walk through the park felt like a “limbo” scene from Inception: pavement for hundreds of yards in each direction, no human in sight, and massive walls of nondescript concrete buildings surrounding the park on all sides.

From there I decided that instead of returning to the air conditioning of my hotel room for a nap, I would return to the sight of one of my chaotic train-switches the previous evening and visit the forested Meiji-Jingu Shrine. The shrine was built in the 1920’s to commemorate the life and death of Emperor Meiji, who reopened Japan to the world after centuries of isolation. It was rebuilt in 1947 after falling prey to Allied bombs. It’s surrounded by a large forest, neatly tucked between huge urban neighborhoods; tradition has it that the park has 100,000 trees, each of which was donated by a Japanese person. Who knows if that’s true.

To arrive at the shrine one must walk a long, wide path through the forest, covered by trees arching overhead. In one section, you pass through a pair of decorative walls: one is a giant rack of barrels of wine, supposedly given by foreign governments as a tribute to Meiji. The other side was a matching rack of hundreds of kegs of sake. Each keg was covered with beautiful Japanese artwork (right), and as the sun set over Meiji-Jingu it made for quite a beautiful scene.

I eventually reached the shrine, which was deep enough in the forest that you couldn’t hear any of the traffic, sirens, or massive mobs of people that cause constant noise in Tokyo. Japanese shrine protocol requires those who enter the shrine to do a series of traditional acts: first you go to a fountain outside the gate, where you pick up one of the dozen or so ladles sitting on a rack, and then, following a specific order, you use the water to wash your left hand, then right, then rinse your mouth, spit it out (outside the fountain, of course), then your left hand again. After you’ve “cleansed” yourself and your spirit, you enter the shrine complex. The climactic point is always the shrine itself, located at the back. You wait your turn to approach the shrine, where you again follow an interesting set of instructions: throw a coin or two into the collection box in front of you; bow twice; clap your hands twice; bow again. I did

all of these, and thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in the experience. These may sound funny to an American audience, but the things Christians do at church are often just as curious.

I definitely had a zen moment at the shrine; as the sun was setting, the air grew comfortable, and the crowds dwindled, I was convinced that I had finally reached one of those thoughtful, calming places that Japan is so well known for. In the middle of the shrine is a ‘sacred tree,’ surrounded by wooden boards on which people have tacked little wood placards with prayers written on them. I loved walking around the tree, looking at the dozens of languages represented, reading the English, Spanish, and Chinese ones in the dying light.

Weirdly emotional and happy to be in such a beautiful place, I bought a board and wrote a ‘prayer’ on it for my friends and family, my students, and the healing of Japan. Most of you know that I'm generally not too big on the whole religious thing, but in that moment it felt less like connecting with a spiritual being and more like connecting to a people, a nation that had been hurting so much over the last 4 months.

I thought about throwing a pic up on Facebook and tagging hundreds of people that I care about but

decided that would be tacky.

My final stop on my opening day in Japan was the unbelievable shopping and entertainment district of Shibuya. This is the only rival I’ve seen, anywhere in the world, to Times Square in terms of chaotic, rampant consumerism. I walked amongst the masses and gawked at the lights, the huge video boards, the screaming music from all directions. Simply unbelievable.

Perhaps only in Asia can you see cultural comparisons this stark within a matter of minutes.

First Week of Teaching - Hsing Hwa HS in Chiayi

I’m posting on the blog now with the goal of summarizing my first one-week assignment here in Taiwan, at Hsing-Hwa High School in Chiayi (Ja-yee). It’s a daunting task. This week was simply too big, too jampacked, too moving, too special to be captured in some sort of play-by-play retelling of all the week’s events. So I won’t do that. I guess I’ll do a bullet point review of my favorite moments and observations. I’ll also ignore the fact that I’m sitting at the bar at 10:45pm in a noisy, 15-seat street kitchen in, of all places...Tokyo. That’s a post for another day.

- The morning of day one at Hsing Hwa was brutal. Each of the 8 teachers from our program that traveled to Hsing Hwa were assigned a home room of either ‘middle schoolers,’ aged 13-15, or ‘high schoolers,’ mostly 16-17 year olds. My group, the Cuba group (a curious choice by the program to name a group Cuba… probably wouldn’t have made my top 8 most recognizable countries list), was of the younger type. The morning was really tough. The kids were incredibly shy, which I expected, but I thought I’d at least get some nervous, quiet reactions out of them. There were basically no reactions at all. In the Opening Ceremony event, I stood on stage in front of 200 students and introduced myself, and in an attempt to forge some team identity, I cried out, “Okay, Cuba, I want you guys to on the count of three, make as much noise as you possibly can! I want the people at the 7/11 down the street to hear us! Ready?! One! Two! Three!” Crickets. Crickets. Not a single peep. The whole room laughed after a few seconds, but the mood carried through to our icebreaker activities and early classes. Bit by bit, however, they started to come into their own. I dedicated a lot of time to talking to each individual student during the exercises and trying to find the confident ones, the class clowns, the stars. After lunch on day 1, I’d found them.

- The high school is located on the outskirts of Chiayi City, ranked somewhere between 6 and 10 in terms of population on the island.

- At right is our fantastic teaching and TA team in Chiayi. Working with all of them was simply awesome.

- We lived in dormitories on the high school’s campus. Some of the students in the summer camp, and throughout the entire school year, live in the dorms during the week and travel home only on weekends, as they live several hours away. The dorms were quite spartan but nice enough… no internet, and air conditioning only from 5:30pm to 6am, but we learned to manage.

- It was freaking hot. And humid. During daylight hours we always tried our very best to stay in the A/C. Expeditions outside were pleasant in the evening, but that was pretty much it. And we had a 10:00 curfew. Which makes it even more improbable that it was one best weeks I’ve ever had.

- My homeroom was split into 5 groups of 4, 5, or 6 students each. They chose their team names: Team Remix, the Eagles, the Bears, Team Gama (Taiwanese for orange, apparently), and the Doggies, which I had to step in and rename when they initially suggested that they name themselves after the Snoop Dogg rap album titled “Doggy Style.”

- Each team created a fictional TV commercial and a drama, the best of which were performed at a closing ceremony for all the classes at the end of the week. I chose Gama, who advertised several orange-based food products, Remix, who made a bike helmet, and Bears, who attempted to sell sunglasses that I modeled aggressively during the closing ceremony. In addition to the commercials and dramas in my own homeroom, I taught two lessons to all of the classes: Table manners, and a USA tour. At right is me working with middle school students on a tourism poster for Miami during the USA tour exercise.

- We teachers agreed that this summer will likely be the closest any of us ever come to being treated like a celebrity. It was difficult to walk through a hallway or across the school grounds without being mobbed by students requesting photos, autographs, or Facebook information. By the end of the week, girls had mustered up the courage to request hugs, which when given were greeted with audible swoons and squeals from the crowd of girls gathered around. I was asked out to dinner several times and given tightly-folded notes routinely. It was absolutely wild.

- Despite the program rule of not spending time with students outside of the school or after hours, our directors made an exception when the girls that lived in the dormitory invited us to dinner in the dorm common room on Wednesday night. The display of hospitality and selflessness that followed was something I’ll never forget, and I may remember it as my first moment of truly loving the Taiwanese. The girls, who certainly didn’t have any money, had somehow scraped together cash to buy us a massive meal, complete with bubble teas and desserts from restaurants around the school. And they had already eaten the school-provided dinner. They just sat and watched us eat and talked. Their generosity was, in a word, overwhelming. We took pictures and played silly games, notably “Hai-Dai,” a variation of rock-paper-scissors that takes a bit more skill and time. The same girls invited us to a ‘snack’ on Thursday, which was a delicious yet curious concoction featuring shaved ice, noodles, what seemed to be root-beer flavored jello, and a series of other unidentifiable items.

- The Taiwanese have a flair for sticking beautiful, historic-looking buildings in the tiny spaces between characterless concrete ones. See the photo on the right.

- One night I went with fellow teachers Brian, Orit, and Kate to meet up with the Taiwanese TA director Rayo, a good friend of ours. He took us through the city center to a tiny open-air restaurant filled with happy-looking locals. The place's specialty: Taiwanese shaved ice, or niu nai xue hua bing. It's not anything like shaved ice in America or Europe. The ice is actually shaved from a frozen block of milk, and is usually mixed with fruit (mango is the most typical, I think) and a type of cream, so that after a few minutes they all melt together into a gooey concoction of goodness. It was awesome, and I really enjoyed chatting with Rayo and a friend of his about life in Chiayi for a 20-something.

- Like their Chinese counterparts, Taiwan’s brilliant, world-renowned engineers too have a problem designing a shower that doesn’t flood an entire bathroom.

- The closest thing to a sit-down meal we had in Chiayi was a Taiwanese dish called niu pai, a sort of sizzling skillet of beef and noodles with either mushroom or black pepper sauce. Delicious, and eating it in a mom-and-pop street kitchen makes it even better. You know you're at a legit, family-owned place when the restaurant bathroom is filled with their toothbrushes and hand towels. Love it.

- The first rule when teaching shy foreign children? Keep smiling. Always. No matter what. Rule #2? Keep smiling.

- 7-eleven in Taiwan is a religion. In Chiayi it was our saving grace; they have free wifi, a copier, printer, can call a cab, everything.

- In chatting with Taiwanese friends and with people who've been here before, perhaps the defining cultural experience, the one go-to cultural event in Taiwan is the phenomena of the night market. Cities set aside massive blocks of space that at night spring into wild, carnival-like landscapes. Hundreds, even thousands of vendors sell strange foods, common foods, sweets, strange drinks, clothes, trinkets, jewelry, everything. Most even feature carnival-style games and gambling sections. The night market is what Taiwanese people of all ages do at night, especially on the weekend. The crowds seem equal parts teenager, families with small children, and elderly people. If you were to come visit Taiwan for 24 hours and wanted to see something purely Taiwanese, we'd head straight to a night market. At right, I share some night-market fare with Syllvia, Kate, Nancy, and Krista.

- Speaking of strange foods, I haven't had anything that outrageous in Taiwan yet... fried fish paste, squid-on-a-stick, and pork blood tofu are the weirdest. And the infamous stinky tofu that is the island's "national dish?" It tastes just as bad as it did in Beijing.

- They really like baseball in Taiwan (a feature of the heavy Japanese influence on the island). Big Major League Baseball games are televised nationally. After hearing I was from Cincinnati, the first reaction from a class would usually be several boys saying, simply, “Reds.” One time I asked a student to use the word “seldom” in a sentence and he responded, “I love Joey Votto but I seldom watch the Reds.” Fair enough. Taiwan has its own domestic league, and Tainan’s team, the Uni Lions, play about 20 blocks from our apartment.

- At the end of the week, it was difficult to say goodbye to the kids, especially in my Cuba group. They knew it was my first time teaching but never said so, and honestly made it so easy. In addition to a healthy load of personal notes and letters from girls in other classes, my awesome TA Nancy had somehow collected a letter from each of my Cuba students and put them in a giant card. I almost got a little choked up after the closing ceremony, they were a really great group. If they’re any indication of how students are across this country, the future is very bright for Taiwan. At right, me, Nancy (in purple), and the Cubans. I'll miss them a lot.

Taiwan Beginnings

Taiwan is not China.

That's not a political statement, so I hope my friends in Beijing don't see it as such.

It's a culture statement, a lifestyle statement. It was one of the first things that Vince, one of our program directors, told us in his introduction to Taiwan.

Taiwan's history is inexorably intertwined with that of the mainland. They share a common tongue, and it was a Chinese territory for hundreds of years.

But just hours after arriving in my new hometown of Tainan, on the island's southwest coast, it was clear to me that this was a different place than those I saw last spring.

Beijing's citizens thought, for thousands of years, that they lived at the literal center of the universe. In some ways, there's still that attitude. Beijing's big, it's bold, and it's proud. Being there feels like being in the belly of the Chinese beast. Tainan's not like that.

Shanghai's rapid ascendancy into the list of the world's greatest cities lends it an attitude of promise, of 'the next big thing.' Shanghai's people move at a speed much like that of the city's growth: frantic. Tainan's not like that.

Things here seem much more casual. The dress code is definitely much more laid back than any Chinese city I've seen. The tones in the language are a little less harsh, a bit less pronounced. There's an amazing food culture here, but it's less about big, formal restaurants and impressive meals, and more about mouthwatering street food sold from the vendors that clog virtually all of this city's major arteries.

Tainan is the fifth largest city in this island nation. In writing this blog, I'll from here on refer to Taiwan as a country just for ease of use, but it is not officially that. If you don't know about Taiwan's history and its political status, a brief crash course: When Mao Zedong and his Communist army took over Beijing, and therefore mainland China, in 1949, the former government, called the KuoMinTang (KMT) fled to Taiwan, a part of China off the coast. There, they fortified the island and held it. The KMT and its leader Chiang Kai-Shek ruled the island and continued to officially claim that they were the sole righteous governing body of all of China. Likewise, Mao ruled all of the mainland but claimed he also ruled the island of Taiwan, which was simply a "rebelling province." This is still the status quo for both sides: China is officially known as the People's Republic of China, while Taiwan's official name is the Republic of China. So while Taiwan is a 'sovereign nation' with its own government, passports, currency, and flag, it is only recognized as an official "country" by 26 of the world's nations. The US is not one of them. When the US naturalized relations with Mao's Beijing government in the 70's, we officially agreed to recognize Beijing as the true government of the mainland AND Taiwan. While there is therefore no American embassy on the island, the US and Taiwanese governments interact in much the same way as all other nations. Still, the issue of Taiwan's political status is very sensitive on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Okay. Sorry for that history lesson. It's critical to understanding the unique identity of Taiwan though, I think. It's also worth noting that Taiwan was a Japanese territory for the majority of the first half of the 20th century, ending with Japan's loss in 1945; massive Japanese influences remain on the island, and some even look back upon those colonial times with nostalgia.

I arrived with 3 of my fellow English teachers on Thursday night, landing in the capital of Taipei, then connecting to the second largest city, Kaohsiung (Gow-shung). We were picked up by a program van driver and in an hour reached our hometown of Tainan. During this first week we've lived at the program office. Our group is called World Passport, and this is its one and only site; the office has 4 stories, the 3rd and 4th floors essentially functioning as dormitories although we sleep on mattress pads on the floor. There's an awesome staff that works in the office, mostly Taiwanese kids about our age that help to set up our teaching engagements.

Literally every street in this city is FULL of vertical signs that hang off the sides of buildings, advertising the restaurants and shops below. Between the hours of 7 and 10, looking down a long street looks like the inside of a pinball machine seen from the ball's perspective. It's wild.

Taiwan, and especially Tainan, are famous for street food. You can get any type of Asian food on almost any street, from safe bets like dumplings and fried rice, to some pretty freaking weird stuff. Tonight we're headed to one of the island's most famous "night markets," where I'm told I'll see the weirdest foods I've ever seen, so stay tuned.

On our first day we mostly spent time getting to know our fellow teachers: 11 of us, all originally from the US although 5 attended high school in Taiwan. It's been a really fun crew so far. On Friday we went towards the city center, where we saw what seemed like thousands of just-released-from-summer-school high school girls in their uniforms, cramming into a giant arcade. It was pretty ridiculous the way these little Asian girls attacked the pop-a-shots and DanceDanceRevolution games... it seems that's the thing to do after school on a hot summer day. We got cool Taiwanese teas and, to hide from the blazing midday heat, saw a movie. We came back to the office and took naps, then woke up around 10 to head to a small local club for some team bonding and icebreaking. It was fantastic; since being away from Asia, I've missed being looked at like a celebrity in bars and clubs.

On Friday we did a photo scavenger hunt with fellow teachers... stay tuned for some shots from that, which were pretty... interesting. In the afternoon I went with friends Orit, Kate, and Krista to the city center where we toured some of the island's oldest temples and saw Tainan's famous old Dutch fort from when they controlled the island in the 1600's. We tried some awesome street food: pancakes filled with red bean, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, and Taiwan's famous "Coffin Cake" (see the Andrew Zimmern episode in Taiwan), essentially an oversized piece of toast, hollowed out, and filled with a creamy mixture of vegetables and shrimp. Delicious.

Today, Saturday, was our teaching orientation, where we met our T.A.s, taught practice lessons, and learned about the program's goals. I was glad to learn that we won't be teaching nitty-gritty English subjects like grammar and punctuation, but will essentially be working to build the kids' confidence in speaking English via fun games and activities. It is, after all, a summer camp.

I'll be in the city of Chiayi this week for my first assignment, along with the majority of the other teachers in our group. I'll have a group of about 20 high schoolers, every day, from about 8-4pm. I'll report back on how it goes! We'll be staying in dormitories, I'm told.

Thanks for checking out the blog. I know I don't have too many hilarious or strange stories to tell yet, but please stay tuned. It's gonna get weird.