Success!

Good news: I made it to Kaohsiung, my home for the next year.  The weather is hot and oppressively humid, which comes as no surprise, since the only thing I’ve heard from Taiwanese people since April is that Kaohsiung is exceptionally hot.

To inaugurate my year of blogging, I thought I might chronicle my truly stellar travel experience.  I left Columbus at 6:10 p.m. on July 31.  From there, I flew to Chicago, where I had a two-hour layover.  From Chicago, I flew to LA, where I had yet another two-hour layover.  From LA, I flew to Taipei, a marvelous 13 and a half-hour flight, where I had—you guessed it—a two-hour layover.  I finally flew from Taipei to Kaohsiung, where I made it through customs with relatively nonexistent hassle.  By 8:30 a.m. on August 2, I was in Kaohsiung.  (By the way, I would like to take just a minute and proclaim the greatness of Tylenol PM; never have I been able to sleep on planes, but thanks to the Tylenol, I was out for a solid seven hours.)

Now, four flights and 26 hours of traveling is not something that brightens anyone’s day.  However, my itinerary had me booked on three separate airlines, which meant that I had to go through security not once, not twice, but three times.  The first time, of course, was in Columbus.  I was assured my luggage was checked the whole way through, but I was only given the first two boarding passes.  Once I got to LA, I had to leave the airport completely.  I walked to an entirely separate building where I was issued my next boarding pass.  From there, I went through security once again.  After arriving in Taipei, after much confusion and several wrong turns, we found our next ticket counter, where we were issued boarding passes to Kaohsiung.

Despite the complications, we did make it to our final destination without any problems.  Before long we were all introduced to one another and random roommates were assigned.  Get this: my roommates are named Kelley, Kevin, and Carol.  But it gets better!  There are twelve Americans here on Fulbrights, eight of which are named Carl, Carol, Caroline, Kristin, Kevin, Kelley, Katherine, and Kaitlyn.  The others are Grace, John, Charles, and me.  It’s going to be a long year—hopefully we’ll create some nicknames pretty soon to prevent further confusion.

On a cultural note, on my first day in Taiwan, I already observed one drastic difference from China.  For our first night in this foreign land, we stayed in a hotel.  Right around the time we were all getting ready to go to bed for the evening—about 8:00 (recall the jetlag)—a very noisy procession manifested itself underneath our window.  As it turned out, yesterday was a religious holiday.  There were people in elaborate face make-up and costumes, Chinese dragons, drums, and the like.  What was so striking was that it was such an overt display of religious freedom—something I never saw even once in four months in China.  And after a mere twelve hours into a year spent in Taiwan, I have already encountered something that throws into sharp relief the difference between these two countries.  It looks like it’s going to be a very interesting year.