deity

My Terrible Awful Thursday


Thursday of Week 3 needs its own post! It was a VERY long day to say the least.

This day was never going to be good. I could feel it in my bones. I have to tell you some background. So, the enrollment system here is weird and confusing. I’d already be registered for 2 of my classes but I was still waiting to get into one of them. If I’d gotten into that class everything would work out fine. I’d have 2 classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1 class on Wednesday and no class on Mondays or Fridays. The only problem was that the class that I wanted to get into was full. I was number 41 on the waitlist (waitlist here works differently, but why in the world are there so many spots?) and I’d emailed the professor about getting added into the class manually but never got a reply. At NCCU if you aren’t added to a class through normal means, you can just show up and have the teacher sign a form that says you can manually add the class. So, this is what I did. However, since I didn’t receive and email from that professor, I had a contingency plan in place. I usually have contingency plans for things that are important to me. Things never go right the first time so, PLAN, PLAN AGAIN.

The specifics of my contingency plan are confusing so I won’t detail the whole process, but I will tell you the SLEW of extra classes that I had to attend this week. I went to that class on Wednesday that I mentioned. It’s a southeastern religion class. It was in the morning, which of course was not ideal since I had to go to the gym before. I went to that class and it was boring as heck. #1 Nothing I am studying has anything to do with southern Asia. I’m definitely an eastern Asia kind of gyal. #2 There were lots of grad students in this class which means lots of work. #3 Everything was basically discussion, based on the reading that I knew nothing about. It was also just discussion for 3 hours straight. Can you pay attention to people flat out talking for 3 hours? (with only a 7 min. break halfway through) Because I most certainly cannot. I was just on my laptop for most of the class doing who knows what. I asked her to sign my add form (just as a precaution) but she almost didn’t sign it! She said there were lots of people in the class and her feedback wouldn’t be as valuable if she had a million papers to grade. While I understand this, I’m also like “LET ME IN YOUR CLASS.” I didn’t actually say that, I kind of just stared at her until she agreed to sign my paper. I told her that I wasn’t absolutely sure if I was joining in the first place. She’s also the one that decided to make the class write those long papers. Don’t punish me because you played yourself! Jkjk, she’s the one that set the limit for the amount of people that could be in the class because she knew her limits but nevertheless decided to sign my paper. Even though I’m not taking your class Dr. Work- you da bomb! So that was a contingency class on Wednesday. I had 2 of them on Thursday.

So, my first dilemma of day occurred at approximately 9:10 am on that rainy Thursday morning. Now one of the classes that I am already registered for was at 9 am on Thursday morning. It was actually what I predicted to the favorite of my 4 classes: Popular religion in Taiwan. This would also be the first week of Thursday and Friday classes since there was a holiday on Thursday and Friday of the previous week/ first week of classes. I had to forgo my Popular Religion class for a contingency class: Globalization and Public Policy. Now, I didn’t want to take this class at all, but I was panicking in case I didn’t get into the class I was waitlisted for. (Art, Society & Popular Culture) I woke up at 7:30 to go to this 9:00 class and see what it was about. So, I get to the building it is in, but whoops. For some reason, someone decided to create 2 different buildings, but join them together for 7 of the like 18 something floors and call them both the General Studies building. One is just the “north building” and the other is the “south building.” This is where I really got screwed over y’all. If you know me, you know that I have an utterly disastrous sense of direction. If you don’t know me, my sense of direction is TERRIBLE, as is both my short term and long-term memory. Please don’t say that I’m too young to have memory problems. I’ve heard it all before. Just add it on to my short list of developmental defects. (lisp, duck feet, misaligned knees, double hand tremor… etc.) (All of these things are super minor and I’ve learned to live/ hide all of them, so I feel like defect is a bit strong of a word) I’d already attended 2 classes in the north building while I’d never had any in the south so you’d think I’d go to the north building. Even though it was against my better judgement and experience, I went to the south building. I went to the floor it was supposed to be on, but the majority of the floor was dark. I started walking around like a dummy, still not getting the picture, until 2 ladies stopped me and flat out told me I was in the wrong place. I knew where to go from there but one of the ladies gave me directions and I just let her talk because I didn’t want to be rude. So, I take the elevator down a few floors, cross the bridge, then take the elevator back up. I finally get to the classroom, about 10 minutes late. There’s only like 4 students in this tiny classroom. Granted, it was a class for master’s students, but still tiny. I sit at the first chair when I get in and am handed a syllabus. I start reading through it. It says the final paper needs to be 15-20 pages. I sat there for about 2 minutes solely trying to decide if I wanted to be safe and just stay for the rest of the class in case I had to take it because of lack of a better option -or if there was no point in staying because there was no way I am writing a 20 page paper on something that I couldn’t care less about.

After spending a whole 4 minutes in that classroom, I announced that I came to the wrong class and skkrt skrrrted my way right out of there. I had already told the professor of Popular Religion in Taiwan (the class that I was missing), that I was not going to be able to make it, but since I wasn’t going to do anything better with my time, and it’s a class I was interested in, I decided to go. It’s far from my first class so it took me about 15 minutes to get there. I was like 30 minutes late, but the professor was excited to see me. Technically Popular Religion in Taiwan is a grad-level class as well put there were much more people in this room. Our professor lectured on Chinese zodiac and some related subjects for about an hour. After the short lecture, we took a field trip! We went to a temple that was only about a 12-minute walk away from campus. I actually talked to my professor the entire time there. I told him about my research proposal. He thought it was very interesting and mentioned that we were going to cover a Chinese medicine unit in class, so he’d try to expand on that. He also told me that if I needed any help or guidance to ask him! This just got me more excited to potentially do my Chinese medicine research. We got to the temple and it was beautiful. There was actually a celebration going on because the following day would’ve been one of the deity’s birthdays. There was a decent amount of people at the temple as well as special decorations, music, and singing!

After finishing up at the temple, I went to grab a quick lunch. I was going to go with some other CIEE people, but I needed something quick because I had less than an hour before my class…. which was also up the horrendous mountain. This is the class that I was afraid that I wasn’t going to get into. You better believe that I was in that building 20 mins. before the class was even supposed to start, I WAS NOT going to be late, which is out of character for me. About 5 minutes before class was going to start, I made my way to the classroom. It was FULL. Granted, it was another small conference room, but all 25 people that were registered for the class showed up and then some. There were only like 3 chairs available in the whole room, so I snagged one and my stuff down. I am what my mother calls a bag lady, so my backpack is always super heavy, and I can be seen carrying 10,000 things in my hands at all times. I went up to the professor and introduced myself. Y’all want to know what this man said to me? “No.” He straight up said no even though I tried to bargain with him. The class was already to full and he wasn’t going to be manually adding any students. While I was disappointed, I fully expected and mentally prepared for this, so I just went back to my room to strategize. My schedule was really riding on the class from this morning or the class that was full so of course I was frustrated. However, I’d been frustrated all week, so I was tired of stressing. I decided to just chill out until my next potential class later that day and I’d plan after I’d attended that class. So, I chill out for 4 hours, don’t even remember what I was doing. I know what I wasn’t doing. Stressing!

Boom. 3 pm hits. The contingency class is at 4. I start moving my booty getting ready to trek back down the mountain. I go to the classroom that the class is supposed to be in. I’m there like a half hour early, so I just go to the back because that’s where the only visible outlet is, and it seems like my laptop is constantly on 20%. After about 20 minutes I’m like “ok, class is starting soon, people should start showing up.” There was a sign on the door and from my rough translation- it didn’t seem like it had anything to do with my class, but I sent it to April, the CIEE coordinator anyways just to check. She confirmed that it did not, in fact, have anything to do with my class. 5 more minutes goes by and I start to panic. It’s now 5 mins. until class is supposed to start and there still wasn’t a single other soul in the room. At this point I get up, go to the hallway and start looking around. That’s when this girl comes up to me. She asks me about the class, and I tell her that we have the same questions. 5 more minutes of us trying to figure out what the heck is going on leads to nothing and now it’s technically time for class to start. Still, no one else has shown up. At this point I’m still very confused but feel better in knowing that I’m not the only dummy that showed up. I pack up my stuff and we go to the first floor to try and see if there’s anyone we can ask that knows what is going on. We can’t find anyone so, at this point, I am messaging April to see if she can find out what’s going on, and the girl I was with, Tina, is messaging her friends that were also taking the class. April finds out that the class was just straight up cancelled. She didn’t say why but I am assuming because there might have been a lack of enrollment. Anyways, Tina’s friends went up to the classroom anyways, so we went up there to meet them. One of the girls, Mae confirmed that she got an email saying the class was cancelled. However, it got sent to her NCCU email which no one checks which is why she didn’t know. I didn’t know because technically I wasn’t in the class yet so I couldn’t have gotten the email.

The 4 of us, Tina, Mae, myself, and the other girl, Monica, are all sitting in this room talking about classes and potential new choices, since we all needed to find one that would replace the one that got cancelled. I’m super hype because I just made 3 NEW FRIENDS. For some people, making new friends is a daily occurrence, but for me, it’s something that I really struggle with, so this, my friends, was a big deal. Anyways we talked about classes and where we’re from and other random stuff. I’m not going to put everyone’s business on MY blog, but I will say that Tina and Mae are both American, and Monica is from Singapore. They all live in I-house which is like a dorm for international students on lower campus. It’s nice and convenient unlike my MOUNTAIN dorm that doesn’t have a mini fridge or an included mattress. I-house has a lottery and is competitive, and my luck sucks, so I didn’t get in. After talking and them telling me about a bunch of fun I-house stuff they do and other aid for international students we parted ways. They had another class to go to, and I just went back to my room. I was so happy! Again, FRIENDS! YAY!

I get back to my dorm and do nothing for a little while, but tonight is the night. KTV! We were going back, but this time with some of the other CIEE students and more ambassadors. There were 10 of us in total this time compared to last time’s 5. There were actually supposed to be more, but we all know how people love to bail. We take the bus there around 9:30. The bus ride wasn’t too long but it was drizzling and the walk after the bus was fairly far. We get there start singing and ordering beer. As a part of going to KTV they give you a minimum amount that you have to spend on food & beverage which amounted to 100 NT$ per person. I wasn’t upset because I was going to need alcohol to drown out my lack of pitch. In the end I ended up ordering 1 regular can of beer and 2 mango beers. Now I definitely am not a beer person, but regular Taiwanese beer is better than American beer and the liquor was EXPENSIVE, so I just went with it. However, I will tell you that the mango beer I ordered was shabangin’. I was pleasantly surprised and will be taking several of them home with me when I leave this country. We were all singing, dancing, having a great time. Around 11 I got some wonderfully wonderful absolutely amazing fantastic news.

I got an email from Patrick (Director of Pitt’s Office of Undergraduate Research/ my mentor & boss) offering me a 2019 Summer Undergraduate Research award. Can y’all say BOOOOOOOYAH?? It’s actually funny because I am writing this before I’ve even formally accepted the award. I have to print out the form and sign it and scan it back to him. It’s a whole process that’ll most likely be done on Sunday. Never mind that, PATRICK I ACCEPT!!!! I was so worried what I was going to be doing over the summer because I don’t get back until June 28th which is mid-summer in college time. Most internships and jobs start at the beginning of June and I’m a junior who really needs something to look good on my resume. With this grant, I’m going to be conducting research on the cultural and religious aspects of Chinese medicine while I’m in Taiwan and while I’m back in America. I’ve done research in the past, but never anything having to do with a social science, never anything where I came up with the research idea, and nothing where I am the FIRST AND ONLY AUTHOR. GO ME!!! My research is starting at the beginning of May and ends in the beginning of August. As of right now I’ll most likely be writing a comprehensive article detailing all of my findings but that might change depending on what I find. Stay tuned chickas! This is also very exciting because the award also comes with a class over the summer so I’m getting credit, interacting with other awardees and hearing about their projects and it gives me much more flexibility for the summer. As of right now the plan is to stay in MD when I get home, work on my research project, shadow my doctor, drive for uber, study for ochem in the fall and the MCAT whenever I decide to take it, and take care of my lil PUPPY. I am so excited for Wes! This paragraph wasn’t actually supposed to be this long but excitement, amirite??? After I got the email I was in real disbelief because I always doubt myself. A bad habit yes, but I was on a cloud for the rest of the night! I shouted out that I got it and everyone said congratulations and we sang Allstar. Truly iconic.

12:30 rolls around a we realize that we should probably go home. Buses and the train stop running at 12 so we all decided earlier that we were going to have to take cabs or ubers back to the dorms. 2 of our ambassadors didn’t live on campus so they took separate modes of transportation home, but the rest of us all live in the same place, so we were carpooling. This is where things went downhill. We leave the KTV building because we didn’t want to loiter, but it was kind of cold outside, so we were rushing. One of the ICLC kids, let’s call him Craig for the sake of me about to rip him a new one on the worldwide web, calls the first uber. His uber is something like $335 to get to the dorms. There are 8 of us so it is clear that we are going to need another uber. Why we didn’t call a cab when it could’ve possibly been cheaper? I have no idea. This is the American mindset. Anyways, the question of who else has uber pops up. I do not volunteer at all because for some reason I always get screwed over when I call the uber. This was no exception. Eventually after lots of pricing, back and forth, and people’s ubers “not working” I end up calling the other uber. My uber is about 100 NT$ more expensive than Craig’s uber. I’m not too happy about it because we’re coming and going to the same place so we should all pay the same. I come up with a bright idea. Wow! What if we just add the two uber fares together and divide by all 8 people. That is fair. That way, everyone is paying the same thing for doing the same thing. Just as we did with taking the bus to go to KTV and paying for KTV itself. No one pays for how many songs they sang. Everyone was there! So, everyone is paying the same! I apologize readers. This is a topic that still gets me riled up so there might be ranting at some points. Anyways, I suggest this while everyone is still there and no one explicitly says anything, but I was not quiet about it, I said it a few times and I saw nodding as well as eye contact. They knew! Since Craig called his uber first, it came first, and 4 people: him, my roommate, Maddie (my Bali partner) and another CIEE girl hop in. After two mistaken car identities, our uber finally comes, the remaining 4 hop in, and we’re on our way back to the dorms. While in the car I get the final quote for our uber, so I ask in the group chat how much the other uber is so that I can calculate everyone’s fare. At this point, I’m just gonna show you guys the receipts, because, DRAMA. Please excuse my language, but we’re all adults and I need to fully convey the atmosphere in order for future events to make sense. I was also tipsy so don’t mind the typos.

Ok people, first off, I’d like to say that we are literally talk about 50 cents in US dollars. CENTS! Craig here is referring to when I refused to pay for any of his 6 pack because I ordered individual beers and homie was trying to say I took from his six pack even though he was across the table and that wouldn’t have even made a lick of sense. Pay for what you drink Craig. You’re not going to boss this little black girl into doing it. I’d love to get into all the sociological concepts of men, especially white men being at the center of American society, and certain gay men (Craig is gay) thinking that certain rules don’t apply to them because they fit into one minority category, but this is not a sociology class. It’s just a blog about my life in Taiwan. Taiwan- where life does not revolve around the white man. I definitely could have handled this situation better, but I am a hothead who had 3 beers in her system. I am a person that is big on fairness and behavior. I escalated the situation, yes, but that was after I was left on read for 15 minutes because every person in that car knew they were wrong. Then Craig just made it worse my having a temper tantrum, so y’all know I had to check him. This is a battle that some people would decide not to fight, especially because it’s so minor. I didn’t really care about the money, but the concept that Craig, my roommate and the other people in the car knew what was fair but decided to disregard it for their own benefit rubs me the wrong way. I also will never let an individual talk to me that way, especially in front of other people! If you let them get away with it the first time, people will continue to walk right over you. As a young black woman, the first idea is for people to walk all over me. If you can’t tell by all the young girls that go missing in metropolitan areas and are never found because of a lack of police involvement, or the entire R. Kelly situation, people just don’t care about black women. In general, I don’t care if strangers “care” about me, but it is important that I am respected. This is a mindset that I’ve built up over the years and extremely grateful to have especially because I want to get into a career field in which black woman almost cease to exist. I MATTER. That may be a lot to draw from an argument about ubers, but it’s not the situation that matters, it the principle that it came from. Anyways, so yeah. That happened. Eventually our uber pulls up to the gate at the bottom of the mountain, but guess what? It was closed and locked with no attendant. So, we got out and trekked up the freaking mountain at 1 am. I was already mad but at this point I was hangry, mad about the situation, tired, a PLETHORA or negativity. After I had been in my room for about 10 minutes, I received a message from Maddie. She offered to pay the difference in what everyone should have paid and what she actually paid. I told her it wasn’t necessary because everyone in my car had already settled it. She told me that the pennies do add up and she completely understood where I was coming from. No one else in my car was as riled up as I was, but we’re all different. I knew what was right and s/o to my girl Maddie for making sure that I knew I wasn’t crazy or just being dramatic. After talking to her, I just went to bed and my terrible awful Thursday was finally over.

I’d just like to point out that I realize that my entire day wasn’t terrible! There were some good parts too. It was just an extremely long day, and the end of the day’s events affected the entire following week. But that’s all going to be in the Week 3 Pt. 2 and Week 4 post.

Week 2

Hello Hello Hello! Week 2 is over and it’s time for me to tell you about it.

Yay! So, at the end of last week, Sunday to be specific, all of the students from the other Taipei program, Intensive Chinese Language+ Culture (ICLC), arrived. The biggest difference between these programs is that the CBPE program includes actually NCCU courses so we are enrolled at the university like any other exchange student. The ICLC students are enrolled through CIEE because they’re only taking Chinese classes and once a week Art in China class offered by a professor that used to work in CIEE.

At first, Danielle and I (my roommate and only other CBPE student) were nervous for the other students to come, but it’s been really nice. We were nervous because we had all of our ambassador’s attention to ourselves. So, when the ICLC students and the ambassadors/our new friends’ actual “buddies” (each student gets 2 ambassadors to be their buddies) they would drop us and go be friends with the new people. Luckily this wasn’t the case. There’s something like 25 ambassadors for only 9 CIEE students. We have come to realize that there is enough love for everybody.

On Sunday and Monday (24th and 25th), when they first got here, there orientation was very similar to the CBPE program orientation. Since Danielle and I had already done the orientation packet and power points, we opted into ICLC meals, but we left when they were doing other stuff. We’ve been finding some other cafes and cool spots to hang out in while we’re on lower campus waiting to do something.

NCCU classes started this week. Classes work a little different here when compared to Pitt or most American schools. For a 3-credit class, instead of having it 3 times a week for 50 mins, I have a 3-hr. class once a week. As a result of this I don’t have classes on Monday or Friday. I am truly living my best life. That’s not even the best part. Yes, it is, but there’s another good part. (2 of them actually) Firstly, the only class that I have on Tuesday is my Chinese class, and for some reason of which I do not know, Chinese classes weren’t staring until the next week. Woohoo! The other good part is that for some reason NCCU decided to have the first week of school at the exact same time as a major holiday. Thursday was Taiwanese Memorial Day and Friday was a deferred holiday. So yes reader, you guessed it. I only had class on Wednesday for my first week of school. It was my Social Media and the Digital Narrative class. The gist of the class is just to look at how social media has affected different aspects of society. It’s more work than I was hoping for, but again. This semester is about self-care, and C’s get degrees! (Only when you’re abroad and can only get transfer credit. If your GPA transfers back to your home school, you should work very hard.)

So, before this week started, I made some goals. I wanted to start going to the gym every day and speak as much Chinese as possible. Since I have so much free time this semester, I have really made a point out of trying to develop healthy habits. I floss my teeth every day. I’m drinking lots of water. (Yet, somehow, I’m still always dehydrated) I’m not over/under eating. I’m reaching out to people more often. These are things that I have struggled with doing in the past, mostly because I didn’t prioritize them and didn’t have time to focus on things that weren’t priorities. Now they are my priorities and I feel great! I went to the gym on Mon-Wed which is every day that we were on campus. I tried to speak as much Chinese as I could, but since it’s been awhile since my last class, not too many coherent sentences were coming out. I put a hold on that goal until I started Chinese classes and could beef up on my skills. Other than these fun things, I watched some Netflix & Hulu, planned my trip to BALI -more on this in the future, and just doing other boring planning stuff for things in my life. I like to plan. I’m a planner even though nothing actually ever goes to plan. I’m a good adapter too hehe.

Tuesday night, we went to 通化夜市 or the Tonghua Night Market. Taiwan has lots of night markets. They’re kind of like a bunch of small shops that sell food, bags, clothes, souvenirs, and other small things. There are also a lot of carnival games and prizes at the night markets. I feel bad for parents because I know the kids that go want to play everything. All of the food was very unique to Asian cultures. While most of everything was Taiwanese or Chinese, there was the occasional Japanese or Malaysian booth. One of the dishes I tried was 臭豆腐 or stinky tofu. As one can draw from the title, it’s tofu and it expels a pungent odor. It’s extremely popular in Taiwan so I ate it for the sake of trying. Surprise Surprise! It was nasty. We are told to say that if we don’t like something, to say we’re not used to it. （不习惯）Usually I’d love to be polite and I said I was going to look at all the differences in culture with the perspective of the Taiwanese, but y’all this stuff smells so bad and it tastes almost as bad. That’s all I’ll say on the subject but just know Brittany is not a fan of stinky tofu. Other than stinky tofu I was prodded to try some other things such as pork intestines/pork lung. While I’m sure they’re just as tasty as can be, I have to draw the line somewhere and I shouldn’t be eating pork anyways so those were a no for me.

On Wednesday, after my class, I met up with some of the ambassadors (we all had late classes) and took the bus to to Welcome Dinner. The food was pretty good, we played 3 truths and a lie, and one of the ambassadors- Ian danced for us! It was a good time. After dinner, we departed to begin our 3-day excursion. The CIEE Taipei center planned this to coincide with the holiday so everyone could go, and no classes would be missed. Here is the schedule of our trip:

The CIEE center rented a coach bus (smaller and nicer than American ones) to take us to all of our locations during the excursion. After about an hour-long bus ride, we arrived in 较细 Jiaoxi and checked into our hotels. Since there were about 30 people on the trip, we had to split into two different hotels that were about a 5-minute walk from each other. Jiaoxi is famous for the hot springs and skin eating fish. Now I’m not talking about Piranhas, I’m talking about the small little fish that were all the rage in America a few years ago. Several nail salons offered a new service where customers could pay to get a pedicure from fish that would simply eat the dead skin off of your feet. Now I haven’t heard anything about that in years, so I’m assuming the FDA was like “naw” and must’ve made it really hard to be able to have that at American salons, but they’re everywhere in Jiaoxi! It’s a lot different though because the fish tanks are as big as a carnival tent and a bunch of people all have their feet in at the same time. As most things in Taiwan, it was pretty cheap to get it done. (I can’t remember the exact price but less around $5 USD) We were only in Jiaoxi that evening so I didn’t have time to do it, but if I’m being honest, I probably wouldn’t have done it anyways. When I do things in everyday life, I try to live by “WWJD.” “What would Joy do?” If you didn’t already know, Joy is my mother and if I wouldn’t want to tell her about something I did while I was here, especially if it could affect my health, I probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. I’m pretty sure my mommy would deem an unregulated fish tank full of dead skin a no no, so I just passed on that.

The other thing that Jiaoxis is famous for is their hot springs. Here I was thinking that these hot springs were going to be like the springs that run off of the Arenal volcano in Costa Rica, but no. They’re just ginormous bathtubs in whatever hotel you decide to stay in. While I probably should’ve taken one of the huge baths- as I was extremely sore from the gym and having the experience itself wouldn’t hurt, I was too tired and went to sleep before I could, and we left too early in the morning (Around 9) for me to take a relaxing bath. Why was I so tired you ask? Well friends, as soon as everyone had settled in their hotel rooms, we decided to go out on the town and walk around Jiaoxi. After enough walking, we went to 7-11 and got some beer and a small (really small) bottle of vodka to share! We went back to the nicer hotel and somehow squeeze 30 people in the decently sized room. They had a loft! We played a bunch of simple drinking games and mafia (one of my faves.) I actually got too tired to actually drink more than one beer, and my roommate and I left around 12:30. Some people were apparently up until 3 am but I would’ve been dead so again, a no for me.

The next morning, we had a weird breakfast in a shack in the parking lot next to our hotel, then headed out for the Yilan Cake Factory. Yilan is very famous for their Yilan Ox tongue cookies. They’re just super thin very long cookies that can be made of just cheese and dough (what we made) or other ingredients that the factory makes and sells, in their cookies.

Making my cookies. Any anger that I may have had, I got out by smashing this dough.

After getting our cookies, we headed left out for lunch. I think we had a little extra time on our hands so made a stop and spent some time visiting the 妈祖 temple in 南天. (Mazu and Nantian) There was a boat yard, so we walked around that a bit then went to take a look at the temple. I love temples because I believe that Chinese Religion is very interesting (I’m taking a class about it this semester) and the art in the temples is simply breathtaking. Every single thing in these temples was handmade or hand carved and any picture from any camera could not do the amount of detail justice. Many temples are very similar, but I never get tired of the art.

After we left 南天 we made our way to Taroko Gorge. A gorge is basically a canyon with a river running through it. It was so beautiful. Mostly unbothered nature at its finest. We were more toward the bottom so the cliffs we SO tall. It makes definitely humbled me when it comes to how small I am in comparison to the rest of the world. (BUT BEST BELEIVE IMMA MAKE MY MARK/ A DIFFERENCE SOME WAY SOME HOW) Somewhat scary, but absolutely an experience I enjoyed and would do again.

We left the gorge and made our way to 花莲. (Hualian) Once again we were in the hotel for a very short amount of time, but we arrived much earlier. We were on our own for dinner this night, but there was a night market and 很有名的小笼包 (very famous steamed buns) a few blocks away. It was raining cats and dogs so Ta’ Morra (an ICLC student with CIEE) and I got very tired and lowkey just wanted to get something quick and not outside. She ended up getting noodles, but I didn’t want those, so I got those super tasty steamed buns and some dumplings to go with it. The rain lightened up and the ambassadors that we were with wanted to go back to the night market so that’s what we did. We walked around and ate, and window shopped like any person at a night market would. As we were about to leave, I wanted to stop at a mini seafood place with raw and fresh oysters and clams. (my absolute FAVORITE) At first, I was just waiting in line just to ask the cashier guy how much everything was and while we were waiting there were 2 guys on the grill. Both of them were tatted up and one was kind of cute ngl. We tried to ask them how much everything was (in Chinese) but then they just pointed to the guy we were already waiting to talk to. This really isn’t relevant to the story or the weekend at all but the not cute guy on the grill was holding a blowtorch to one of the giant oysters. He was working on the oyster the entire like 7 mins that we were standing there so props to those guys for putting in the work but also, I want to taste blowtorched oyster. I feel like it’s a delicacy. Back to the story- a few minutes after we asked the guys, the cute one passes me an oyster bigger than my head with salsa on it. At first, I was panicking because 1. I didn’t know if it was free and didn’t want to have to pay for it when I didn’t order it 2. I didn’t know how spicy the salsa was, so I really could’ve died. From the body language that I was getting from the guy and the ambassadors I just assumed it was free, so I SLURPED the heck out of that oysters. It had to take it in two slurps because it was so big. The salsa was slightly spicy but definitely tolerable. Right after I finished the oyster, the cashier guy told me the prices (I don’t remember how much the clams were, but the giant oysters were 200 NT$ each which is fair. I was full from my buns, dumplings, and other night market food the ambassadors bought that I tried, so I took a pass on staying out for longer just to spend a rack and be glutinous. However, that oyster was shapoppin’ and mark my words. I WILL be back.

During this whole day I was also in a lot of pain because my muscles hate me and even if I stretch before and after a hard workout, they fill up with lactic acid and are hard as rocks (in a bad way.) So, when I got back, I decided to take a bath before I took a shower to get these babies to soak. I had another long day ahead of me the next day and I didn’t want it to be as bad. After my bath and shower (you can’t get clean if you just sit in dirt), I hit the hay.

The next day I actually don’t remember at all what we had for breakfast, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say food. We started the day’s adventures with the Sugar refinery. The most interesting thing about it was the general scene and the ice cream. We only spent about an hour there. Then we went to the Wetlands. It was basically a bunch of grass and water. It was land that was wet. Not too much going on but it’s so refreshing to see all the green and breathe such fresh air. Those mosquitoes were ruthless. I work jeans and they bit me through my pants. Be careful out here in these skreets. After the wetlands we had lunch at a very mediocre restaurant then made our way to the beach.

The beach was a rock beach, but you weren’t allowed to take rocks from the beach, or you could get fined. Me being me, I hear the word “fined” and run the other direction, so I didn’t take any rocks home, but I did buy a coconut. They had guys near the parking lot with carts full of coconuts. I love real coconut water and cannot drink and of that stuff in the boxes of America, so I was so happy when I bought mine. I named him Larry and we really enjoyed our time together while we still had it. We took lots of pictures at the beach then finally started our 2.5 hr. journey back to NCCU.

For some reason my leg muscles were fine on this day but I’m pretty sure I slept on my back and shoulder wrong the night before and they were still sore so again, I was in a lot of pain. I finally gave in a took some strong Advil from a friend so that I could make it to NCCU and buy some tiger balm before my body gave up on me. We had a meal box on the bus on were just chilling when we got back. On Saturday, I was so tired that I went and got lunch around 12 then went back to my room and actually stayed there for the rest of the day/night. It was my recovery day. I feel like I was slightly more productive on Sunday but not enough so that I can actually remember what I did. Anyways, this is the conclusion of Week 2. It was long and tiring but I had a great time!