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so i’m still having a lovely time here, but it feels like my life here is starting to stagnate. still doing fun stuff, exploring, going around and looking for jobs and things, but it’s starting to get repetitive, i’m falling into a pattern. so today i have taken dramatic action. i have written a letter to everyone in taipei asking them to be my friend.
here is the text of that letter.
Hello!
I got to Taipei a little while ago and am having an AMAZING time here so far, but unfortunately, most of the exciting things I've been doing have been done alone. I've met fewer people here than I thought I would, and my life is starting to get repetitive.
In addition to this, I'm currently staying in a 6 person dorm in a hostel, and someone has moved in who has very little sense of personal hygiene and manners. Point is, it seems like couchsurfing for a couple days would solve ALL of my problems!
I am very tidy and sociable, and will of course be happy to bring a bottle of wine, case of beer, or treat for a dinner of your choice in exchange for an evening of your time. I'll do my very best not to make it boring =)
I'm currently looking for a job teaching english, so if anyone is currently doing that or has any tips, that would be ideal, but please don't let a lack of that qualification stop you from responding! I would still love to meet you!
Thank you in advance, have a great day!
i posted it to the taipei group on couchsurfing, a super-cool website you can read more about HERE. there are 1820 people in this group, and if not a single one of them wants to be my friend, i am coming home because i am clearly a lost cause who will never be loved. the nice thing is that if it works out, i can spend the money i would have spent on a hotel room buying a nice gift for whoever i stay with!
anyway, i’ll keep the world posted on if i’m staying with people, and don’t worry, people don’t die from staying with complete stranger very often. i don’t know the exact figures, but i’m pretty sure it’s like single digits.
so I’ve been looking for a few days, calling around surfing the net, and i got a job! it pays 80000 ntd per month, which is like 20k more than i had hoped and 30000 more than i had expected! the other great thing is i was looking for apartments while I was doing this, and there was one that I really wanted that was a 5 minute walk from the main mrt station, was near a university (presumably full of kids), and was a studio with 1 bedroom for only 11000 a month (amazing amount of stuff for the price), which was a little outside my price range when i was expecting a worse job, but now that’s chump change. so basically I’m set.
in other news, happy april fools’ day.
i AM looking for jobs and apartments, but I haven’t found anything amazing yet. i called a recruiter today and plan on meeting with her tomorrow, so that’s progress. i didn’t find anything great on my own, so this seems like a good way to go. still looking, but we’ll see. the next several entries in here will likely be about the thrill of the hunt.
missed an entry whoops, actually missed tonight’s too but i woke up in the middle of the night hooray nightmares.
it was actually pretty awesome as far as nightmares go, a good plot to it. me, joey, sven, and karen were at their house (serenity) and there was someone trying to get in. they had cut the phone lines, we had barricaded the doors and found weapons, it was like murder chess.
the bad guy had a hook hand and flicked acid on people out of a bottle. (how do you hold a bottle in a hook? how do you stick a hand in acid to flick it? who cares, he also had a chainsaw.) he never really had a good motivation but that just made him scarier.
joey died first, the bad guy got in through his room and we had to barricade joey out or we all would have died, sorry joey, it was sven’s idea. karen went next, she got too close to a wall and made noise, so hook shoved a chainsaw through it, clever. don’t know why he didn’t cut his way through actually.
then i woke up.
anyway it was terrifying and it woke me up so i’m writing about it. good times in taiwan.
i still stink at it.
but i’ve gotten farther in rosetta stone, and can say a lot more now. i’m just really really bad at the tones. i can try to say things correctly (also very slowly) but i can’t really hear the differences at all. chI chi CHI whatever it all sounds like eating. it’s cool though because i’ll hear snippets of words that i know when other people are talking. it’s like 1 word in every conversation, but that’s better than when i came here i guess.
i also am learning the really common words in writing, like up, down, zhong, big, little, mountain, etc. i can recognize exit but have no idea what the two characters that make it up are, except the first one is two mountains stacked on top of each other and the other one might be mouth. it’s a weird language.
so summary:
i still stink at it.
i went to a place called room18 yesterday. it wasn’t as nice as luxy, the place i went to see far east movement yet, but the guy who took the pictures doesn’t want to be my facebook friend so we’ll have to take other pictures.
it was pricey, like 15 bucks to get in, and that includes 2 drinks. still though very nice place.
i went by myself and figured i’d just make friends with people that’s why people go out right? well it worked, and a big group of girls pulled me over to the bar and helped me figure out the drink tickets and talked to me and we all just had a grand old time. i explored the place which was amazing and had better music than gainesville (i remember a mix of respect by aretha and shots by that guy, that was a good one). it was a fun night. might go out again with the girls, i’m facebook friends with one of them now, so that’s serious business.
oh man it turns out there’s a pizza place like a block away from where i live and it’s amazing and the meal pictured here only cost like $6.
i’ve been wanting shoes that fall in between the category of sneakers and dress shoes ever since i got here. i guess call them going out shoes. problem is, i haven’t really seen anything in my price range that i like (scratch that, i saw some last night, but everything was at least a size and a half too small). so when i heard about wufenpu, a mecca for cheap clothes, where the people working at night markets selling cheap clothes go to buy stuff, i got excited.
i read about how to get there, but the article i was reading straight out lied and took me 4 stops down the wrong metro line. i found some wifi, went back to the mrt, got off at the RIGHT stop, and found the place. not very impressive looking, it’s like like 8 shops wide. like little stall shops, not like big shops. there aren’t even throngs of people all over the place. pretty disappointed.
but if there are shoes inside, i should still go look, i paid like 8 bucks just to get here between 3 mrt fares and the drink i had to buy to get access to wifi. so i walk inside, and within 30 second i’m completely lost, everything looks exactly the same, the corridors are twisty and turny and so long you can’t see the end of them. there are clothes stacked up 4 feet high in every stall and everything’s half as much as it is in the other stores i’ve seen.
the bad news is most things are ladies’ clothes, so i couldn’t buy them. or i could but people would look at me funny. either way not shoes.
it was a really interesting trip, i never found the shoes i was dreaming of, but i did buy a sweater so i don’t have to wear my brown jacket everyday. i love that thing but every day for 2 weeks gets a little repetitive. (ps aunt amy it’s the jacket you gave me, another thing to say thanks for =) this is just something else so i can end the parenthetical clause not on an emoticon, i just think it looks stupid and I’d rather add on more words)
the most exciting part of the trip was that there was not one but TWO gator shirts there, i didn’t see anything for any other u.s. college, but yeah, gators get two things. one of them was red. uf might not get money from that one.
there are a lot of things here that make me miss home. like the automatic opening doors that start just a little bit later than in the u.s., so you have to stop right in front on them for a second. i have a lifetime of expecting that door to open in time for me to get there, and i’ve walked into more than one door when i wasn’t paying attention. but for every little thing like that, there are 3 that make me happy and think “why haven’t we done that?” so below are some of the little things that have made my day while i’ve been here.
there are temples and crazy things every few blocks. i guess this would be where my roomie would work if he was a real monk. (side note he smells terrible and you can smell our room from down the hall, i have to open the window everyday when he’s gone) but yeah the temples and streets are really interesting.
they take pride in their fountains here. this one is a memorial to people from something, that’s all i could read. inside,there’s like a bottomless well that bubbles up water. there are hexagonal bricks in a little river to get to the middle of the fountain, the whole thing is just really cool. it was in a park that’s kinda near my hostel (like a 10 minute walk) i wanted to get a picture that didn’t have people in it, but this guy walked REALLY slowly and another big group was on it’s way to check out the inside, lesser of two evils.
i pass this dog every day and he just makes me happy. there are dogs all over the place. this is the only dog i see who isn’t wearing a sweater, i’ve seen wild dogs wearing little hoodies.
i went into some little restaurant because i got lost and needed wifi to find my way to this cheap clothing mecca called wufenpu (turns out the first place i got directions from just straight up LIED and told me to get off at a metro station on the other side of town). i ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a bailey’s iced chocolate (it was like 4 USD, kinda pricey for things over here). it was art.
Cool statues all over the place, this was outside what i think is a library, maybe a something else.
