Somewhere back in my subconscious I stored images of Asian eyes peeking out over surgical face masks long before I even first came to China or Taiwan. I, like many Americans, did not really understand anything about this practice. Somehow, I had gotten the impression that it had to do with containing the spread of …
Does looking at a region’s top-watched internet videos count as cultural research? Here are my brief summaries and commentary on Taiwan’s top 2013 Youtube videos, followed by some concluding thoughts. Some things to keep in mind: I have not done anything to look up the back story for these videos, so this exercise of watching …
Day four of this week-long-blogathon and I’m feeling the fatigue/writer’s block. There are a couple of topics that I really want to write about but somehow it’s after midnight and I just don’t think I have the energy to do them justice. Instead, here are a collection of things I’ve written while hanging out at …
The cultural understanding of distance is different in Taiwan. While this sounds like a trivial matter to devote time discussing, not only is it something that I encounter frequently in my daily life, but it is also something that I hadn’t considered malleable (nor considered all that much ever) before I moved to Taiwan. What …
[I wrote most of this back in June. Cleaning out old ideas and scraps of blog posts – here we come! Also, lots of pictures for this post.] When I have the chance, I like wandering around in the woods. Here are a few reflections on hiking trails in Taiwan. Taking day trips to …
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 …
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 …
Yesterday I found myself trying to explain a “food desert” to a Taiwanese friend. It turned out difficult to convey, but not due to the language barrier. Instead, it emphasized some very strong differences related to the supply of food in between these two countries. My friends and I got to the point of introducing …