In August, the air is thick. The humidity hangs on you like a quilt...

And so it came to pass that I survived my first three weeks in Taiwan, which included numerous home repairs, many hundreds of dollars spent furnishing the apartment, one terrible typhoon, and two earthquakes.  Yes, you read that right.  You heard about the typhoon already, but I hadn’t mentioned the two earthquakes.  For reasons unbeknownst to me, natural disasters follow me around the globe (though, granted, the earthquakes were mild).  Riots do, too.  Even in China, of all places.  Thus far there have been no riots to speak of, but I’ve got a whole year, so opportunities abound.

When I was in China, I used this space to describe my observations on Chinese culture.  I would very much like to continue doing this, but at this point, I don’t have too much to report.  The way to describe Taiwan that makes the most sense to me is to juxtapose what I see in Taiwan with what life was like in China.  As the year goes on, I’m sure I’ll have more interesting things to share, but for now, I’m going to have to stick to surface details.

Superficially, China and Taiwan resemble each other in many respects.  The basic architecture is the same.  Buildings are often crammed so close together it’s a wonder how they got there in the first place.  Temples are interspersed with apartment buildings, high rises, and the like.

However, for two countries that are so proximally close to one another and that even speak the same language, China and Taiwan differ wildly in several respects.  Smoking, for one.  Yes, people smoke in Taiwan, but not nearly as much as they do in China.  After I returned back to America from China, the smell of cigarette smoke would actually make me nostalgic for China.  I find this quite remarkable because, truly, there are few scents I find more vile than that of cigarette smoke.  However, not nearly as many people smoke in Taiwan as in China.  In China, it was miraculous if I could walk five feet out of my apartment without seeing someone smoking.

What’s more, the streets are actually clean.  Parents don’t let their kids take a dump on the sidewalk.  No one spits on the ground.  The air quality is vastly superior to China’s.  And there’s space.  There may not be a whole lot of it, but you don’t feel claustrophobic by default, a result of China’s entire populace converging on you at the same time.

One of the things that surprised me about Taiwan is how people dress.  I was very much expecting people to dress like they did in cosmopolitan China—dressed to the nines all the time.  However, as it turns out, people actually wear flip-flops.  And shorts.  And jeans.  And t-shirts.  This is fantastic, since I don’t have to feel like a slob every time I go outside.  I’m especially pleased that people wear flats all the time—in China, four-inch heels were considered perfect for daily wear, something I never found very practical.  Considering the fact that all the sidewalks are tiled and it rains all the time, I never understood how Chinese women survived walking about every day.

Perhaps the most positive difference between the two countries is that every time I get into a cab, I do not fear for my life.  In China, drivers are beyond insane.  They weave in and out of traffic, they cut in front of other cars with inches to spare, no one wears seat belts, and they honk their horns at least twice a second.  On the contrary, here, people actually stay in their lanes, they don’t constantly honk their horns, and they appear to obey traffic laws.  It’s really quite nice.  You couldn’t pay me to drive in China, but here, I wouldn’t be nearly as worried about it.

Anyway, while I’m not busy experiencing typhoons or earthquakes, being thoroughly oriented, or filling out the apartment, I’ve been getting in a little sightseeing.  Last night we went to Qijin Island, an island just off the coast (as in a five-minute ferry ride) of Kaohsiung.  The idea was to go watch the sunset, but we somehow arrived moments too late.  Instead, we wandered around the beach and ate seafood as fresh as you can get it.  The beach was beautiful, albeit covered in driftwood from the typhoon.  It was a black sand beach, at once dramatic and intriguing.  The shore was littered with shells and what appeared to be pieces of tile softened by the sea.

After the failed sunset, we enjoyed a feast of crab, shrimp, clams, and fish.  All in all a very interesting culinary experience—it came as no surprise that the shrimp still had heads, eyes, and feelers.  One of my fellow ETAs even ate a fish eye.  I didn’t quite have the gumption to remove the spinal column from the shrimp, so I kept my distance from them.  All in good time, I suppose.

I am including with this post two pictures: the first is a picture of the beach on Qijin Island and the second is a picture of our incredible coordinator, Fonda, with another ETA, Grace.