In the morning, breezes by the coast seem their freshest, and also just the right amount of playful to highlight some of my favorite parts of biking in Taiwan. Of course, if one is looking for adventure, the best time to fight the coastal winds is at night; oftentimes they are so strong that I …
Sometimes, being “a foreigner” in Taiwan is tiring. I have avoided this topic because I feel that there is nothing particularly fresh that I can bring to the descriptions of my experiences in this regard. Yet recently I’ve wondered why exactly it was that I decided to come back to Taiwan, and face all the …
Only recently I realized that my joy in mailing things is probably at a level that it would be appropriate to call it a “hobby”. Some years ago, I started on a personal project to try to send at least one postcard to a friend every week. My motivation was simply that I have …
Some folks back in the States with whom I’ve been keeping in touch have noticed that I start corresponding with them when it’s still very early in the morning in Taiwan. Some amount of abnormal sleeping habits could be attributed to jetlag after first arriving, but that’s long past, and I’m still often awake at …
One of the joys of moving to a new place is always getting accustomed to finding one’s way around new roads – well, “joy” is the optimistic spin that I put on it as I try to find adventures when I get lost instead of frustration. I simply try to allot a little extra time …
I’m back in Taiwan. A lot has happened in the interim since I last wrote, and I apologize for the long absence. Maybe sometime I’ll get around to filling in some of that missing time and writing out what has gone on, but for now I’m just going to pick up from the present. When …
Sometimes I think that I have completely and comfortably settled into life here. Sure, there are sometimes communication issues, people asking me where I’m from, and systems that I don’t quite understand. These things I have come to take in stride as just part of my life these days. I even find them to be …
Last week, I paid a visit to 山外山有機生態茶園農場, (roughly translates as Mountain Outside Mountain Organic Ecosystem Tea Farm. I will refer to it as SWS for the remainder of this post). As my experience with tea farms and organic tea farms continues to grow, I am starting to appreciate the individual stories that each has …
This is to contrast the previous post of all-business text. The following gallery is a not-particularly-well-organized photodump from the past few weeks of times when I have been goofing off.
A few weeks ago, Fulbright Taiwan hosted a conference for all of the researchers in the greater China area: the Fulbright Research Workshop (傅爾布萊特年度研討會) with attendees from Taiwan, China, Macau and Hong Kong. The conference was packed with activities, which only makes sense given the effort of bringing together such 70+ people in the same …
Midyear Research Conference: Reflections on Taiwan vs. China Read More »