Amidst all of the fun I’ve been having in Taipei, I almost forgot about the dreaded midterm season. School here isn’t as challenging as back in the States, but it’s still quite time-consuming. If I’m MIA in the next couple weeks, you’ll know why.
All and all, everything has been great. I just wanted to give a quick update on everything.
Over the weekend, I had to make a quick stop to Bangkok. I had some visa issues and had to leave Taiwan for a bit to get them straightened out. Since I spent time with some family friends and this is my 4th time in Bangkok in the last couple months, I didn’t do anything too interesting. Actually, the really interesting event that I want to blog about happened on the flight back.
![Barnes_&_Noble.com_-_Image_Viewer_Animal_Farm,_by_George_Orwell,_Mass_Market_Paperback,_50th_Anniversary_Edition[1]](http://morgannae.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/barnes__noble-com_-_image_viewer_animal_farm_by_george_orwell_mass_market_paperback_50th_anniversary_edition1.jpg?w=640 "Barnes_&_Noble.com_-_Image_Viewer_Animal_Farm,_by_George_Orwell,_Mass_Market_Paperback,_50th_Anniversary_Edition[1]")
To get back to Taipei from Bangkok, I flew KLM Royal Dutch airlines. Since it was the layover connecting flight on a longer flight from Europe, I was riding with passengers who were mostly travelling from Amsterdam or Brussels to Taipei, Taiwan. During the flight, I sat next to this nice elderly man — who I assumed was Dutch or French until I got to chatting with him and realized he was a Belgian professor!
Interestingly enough, we began chatting because he started saying things to me in mandarin such as “qing zhuo 請坐” (“please take a seat”, when I would get back from the restroom and had to wiggle past him into my window seat). I, being pleasantly surprised at his good pronunciation, striked up a conversation. How long had he learned mandarin? Is this his first time coming to Taipei? He told me he had only studied mandarin for a year for fun and was going to stay in Taipei for three months!
As our light, friendly airplane chat continued, I found out that he was actually a french literature and comparative history of ideas professor in Belgium and was going to lecture and teach French and French literature at National Taiwan University, the best University in Taiwan, and several other universities in Taipei. When I asked him if he had visited China before, he responded that yes, he had been to Beijing — to teach french literature at Peking University. (He said it so nonchalantly, quite humbly, like it was no big deal to teach in some of Asia’s best universities)
When he saw that I was reading Animal Farm by George Orwell, he told me that he had taught Orwell’s works in Belgium and wanted to know if I had read any french authors. I responded, sheepishly, that I hadn’t really… only maybe Moliere and Voltaire.
“Ah! But that’s still good that you know a few French authors.” He’d say. “Do you like George Orwell? Have you analyzed the meaning in his works? His novels are very interesting….”
Personally, I was a bit in awe by the presence of this sweet elderly man who, although already so accomplished in his fields of study, still wanted to spend his time learning a difficult language such as mandarin. His mind was so sharp and quick! When we began filling out the small customs forms and preparing for arrival, I sneaked a peak at the birth date on his passport and saw that he was already in his early seventies!!
“I wish I had started learning mandarin sooner,” he told me, “but ah, better late than never!”
What a great attitude. I hope that when I age, my mind will age as gracefully as his has.
Who knew that life would suddenly give me the gift of a charming old Belgian professor? 
It’s been a while since I posted something funny. Here’s one of my all time favorite jokes, video style.
Lately, all I’ve been thinking in Taiwan is “I can’t believe how quickly time is flying by… I really don’t want to leave.”
I absolutely love it here; it’s really convenient, the people are really nice, my friends here are awesome, and the food is fantastic. Thinking about everything I love about my life in Taipei, along with all of the things I miss about home, has made me feel a bit torn. I’ve left my heart in so many places — Europe, Asia, Seattle — I don’t know where I’ll want to end up when I graduate. I took this long trip to answer some questions I had and somehow along the way, ended up with more than I started with.
When you’re happy anywhere — when you feel at home everywhere — when you fall in love with every place, every story, every city, every country, every type of food, and every wonderful person you meet — what do you do?
I really wish I knew.
Interesting quote I found today. I don’t think monolingualism is a disease, but I do think everyone should try to learn at least one other language in his or her lifetime.
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This coming weekend is the Moon Cake Festival, or “Mid-Autumn Festival”. I’ve already bought my speed rail/bullet train tickets to Taichung and will be spending this weekend with my grandparents and cousins to celebrate the festivities. This will be my first time (that I can remember) being in Taiwan with relatives to celebrate this holiday; I’ve been told there will be a lot of Chinese barbecuing involved?
An afternoon at Danshui, Taipei, Taiwan.
I’m excited! I hope to take lots of photos to share with you guys later.
In the last two weeks or so, I’ve had a really great time in Taipei. I’ve only ever come back to visit family, so I never really made any local friends or really immersed myself into the daily life that is living in Taiwan. Since moving here and starting school, I’m experiencing a part of Taiwan and Taipei I never got to before; I love it! Last weekend, I went on a trip to Danshui (the northern part of Taipei) and spent the evening hanging out with some new Taiwanese girl friends: snacking at the Night Market, chatting and joking around, and sitting by the bay enjoying the sunset. The girls were so sweet and so funny! I’m really happy to be here, I feel like I’m starting to get reacquainted with a small part of me that I had long forgotten.
National Chengchi University logo
The first week seemed like it flew by: I got settled in my dorm, met my roommates, started classes, and then BAM — it was the weekend already.
At first I thought it would be challenging sharing a dorm room with 5 other people, but I’ve actually found that I like it. My roommates are all really nice girls, and I chat in mandarin with my three taiwanese roommates a lot. Everyone has been really helpful with any questions or concerns I have and it hasn’t been too hard getting to know people: I try to go with the mindset that other girls are probably shier than me, so I try to be a bit more outgoing and initiate conversations first.
The first week of classes was mostly sitting in courses and deciding which ones we’d like to take. Since I’m in my senior year, there’s a limited number of classes I can take that will fulfill my degree requirements; there were some cooler sounding courses, such as ”The High-Tech Industry in Taiwan”, but I had to settle for some core courses and an elective: Organizational Behavior, Financial Management, Information Management, and Global Leadership. Although the fall semester here ends in January, all of the professors have been very accomodating in letting students that need to leave early (such as me) to do so in December. Most of them got their degrees in the U.S., so they understand how the university calendars are different.
With the exception of one class, Information Management, I’m taking all of my classes in English. The College of Commerce teaches a lot of their courses in English with american textbooks because they believe teaching the way U.S. business schools do is the best way to give their students the best advantage. As one professor put it, English is the language of business ,and Taiwanese students should get used to listening, speaking, and conducting their projects in English. I guess this system works out for me since I can take Information Management in mandarin, while still having the textbooks and tests in English. However, after sitting in on many of my classes, I have to say I do admire the taiwanese students in my courses; I couldn’t imagine taking business courses in English when I have difficulty communicating in that language.
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After a week getting the academics all sorted out, I hopped on a bus and took the metro to meet up with my mom at an auntie’s house. My mom has been here a week and decided to go stay with her friend, who I call “auntie SuFang” in Chinese culture, for a couple days before she flies back to Seattle. I haven’t seen auntie SuFang since I was little, probably around 7 or 8 years old, and so I was really excited to spend some time with her and my mom. SuFang owns a clothing store in a Taiwanese morning market and lives right above it. My mom and I stayed in her house and spent most of the day with her downstairs at the store, chatting with the neighborhood housewives that stop in during their morning stroll or grocery trip. It was really nice to be completely immersed again into a completely non-english, Taiwanese culture; I felt 100% at home.
A typical morning market in Taiwan. This isn't the one my auntie works in, but it's similar.
Spending time with auntie SuFang made me remember how funny and easy-going she is, which made me very reluctant to leave and go back to school Monday: I wanted to spend more time with her! Hopefully, in the next couple months, I’ll get the chance to go back and see her again. It would be nice to leave the “exchange student” atmosphere and plop back into the simple Taiwanese daily life I enjoy so much.
Kratie, Cambodia
I love my blog, even if my recent lack of entries doesn’t show it.
I’ve decided that since having no internet made it very difficult to keep my travel stories up to date, I’m going to put my Cambodia and Laos stories on hiatus for now. There are so many things to blog about now that going back and trying to catch up would make me chronically behind on everything. I’ll type up everything in a nice MS Word or something and post them all later — maybe something like the “The Lost Chronicles of Cambodia and Laos”…lol. In the meantime, I’d like to fast forward a bit and start sharing about my arriving to Taipei, Taiwan.
A couple days ago, my aunt and my mom (who decided to fly from Seattle and meet me in Taipei) picked me up at the airport and took me to our family home in the city. My great-aunt (my mom’s oldest aunt — grandpa’s sister) recently had a stroke or heartattack of some kind, and all of the sisters (the other 4 great-aunts), and my grandpa and grandma came up from Changhua to take care of her for a few days. After country hopping around for a while, it was quite nice to be around family again, even if — out of about 10 people in the house — I was the only one under the age of 50. Watching my grandma, great-aunts, aunt, and mom sitting on little stools, huddled around a bucket of vegetables on the floor, plucking at the long green leaves, and chatting away with one another, seemed to really immerse me back into the simpler times in Taiwan that I’ve missed.
All of my older relatives speak Taiwanese, a dialect of Chinese, and very little Mandarin. Since I only understand a little of Taiwanese and speak close to none of it, it’s always been a bit hard to communicate with them; we always resort to a small game of charades and broken “Mand-wanese.” Sometimes when I think about it, it makes me a bit sad: I really admire my grandpa and his accomplishments, and I wish I could talk to him more.
National Chengchi University (photo taken from internet)
Today, my youngest aunt flew in from Shanghai to visit everyone. After having a couple days to get settled, I got my things packed again and my mom and she took me to my dorms at the National Chengchi University (NCCU), where I’ll be studying in the next few months. It took me a few hours to get my things unpacked and in their proper place, but once I did I got the opportunity to know my roommates (3 taiwanese students, 2 other exchange students). I also had the opportunity to meet my “NCCU buddy”, a student who would get me acquainted with the school and area, and grab some dinner with him and his girlfriend. They are very sweet and will be be grabbing some dinner with a mutual friend of ours (who I met in Seattle! Small world!) tomorrow evening. I’m glad I’ll know some people to practice and improve my mandarin with.
Tomorrow morning, I start my first College of Commerce courses. I’m quite excited. I hope they aren’t too hard, but at the same time… I hope they don’t bore me either. I’ll let you all know soon what I think of them. Things have gotten off to a great start, so I’m sure things will be interesting.
Note: Photos to be posted soon, check back later.
After a wonderful week staying with my friend’s family in Singapore, I packed my backpack and headed back to Bangkok. I was staying in there for two nights before my next trip to Cambodia and Laos, and my mom’s good friend – a Thai native – had returned home from a trip and wanted to show me around the city. Although I had already seen the touristy spots, such as the Grand Palace, during my last stay in the city, I was really looking forward to Ponsie showing me a side of Bangkok only a local could know.
Although I had avoided the true “rainy season” for the first three weeks, my luck with good weather seemed to run out the moment I stepped off the plane. Within the first day, there was enough rain to make up for those first sunny weeks. After I checked in, Ponsie and I spent some time around the neighborhood, doing some jewelry shopping, and I found some beautiful silver rings. Afterwards, we went to Chinatown and Ponsie insisted that I try some shark fin soup – a Chinese delicacy that was known to be the specialty of district. Normally, I try to avoid exotic animal products while traveling but it had been a while since I had shark fin soup, and I wanted to try a small bowl. We ordered some other great complementary dishes, but the soup was definitely my favorite – it was delicious!
Before long I had to head back to my inn and Ponsie to go home because the rain started pelting down. Being from the Pacific Northwest, I’m used to rain, but these storms were something different. Tropical showers barely give you any warning before buckets of water start falling from the sky; one moment you’re walking along and the sky’s looking a little grey, the next moment you look like you’ve just fallen into a pool with your clothes on.
The first night was an early night for me; I went to bed right after I got back to my room. The following morning, I had to get up bright and early to meet Ponsie for an afternoon at the largest outdoor market in Bangkok. We were going to get there at around 9am but when I woke up, it was raining so badly that Ponsie called and told me she’d be late – her neighborhood had flooded and taxis were reluctant to go in to pick her up.
After two nights in Bangkok (where a hostel’s internet seemed to hate me and made it impossible to post a newentry), I made my way across the border to Cambodia. I haven’t much time to blog as much as I want to, since the internet access and availability here is much less extensive than the other places I’ve been in — which I didn’t know was possible lol. Today, we went to the Temples of Angkor, made famous by the movie Tomb Raider, and tomorrow we head off Phnom Penh and I hope I’ll be able to blog more. I’ve been in Cambodia 3 days and it’s already been a bit of an emotional roller coaster. The Cambodian people have just begun to recover from decades of suffering and war, and the stories I’ve heard have been both inspiring and heart-wrenching. I really hope to share soon.
Love,
Morganna
Ahhh Singapore, it’s been so long!
Between 1994-1998, my family lived in Singapore, and I attended elementary school there. To me, those were the days I have the fondest memories of: playing mermaid at my best friend’s pool, making sand castles during recess, playing video games with the best friends, and roller blading with the neighborhood kids. When we moved to Washington, in 1998, those were the memories I held onto and were the ones I looked forward most to revisiting. Who knew that it would be another decade before I would go back and see my friends again? Sometimes life happens and time just passes by much too quickly. In the decade I had spent away from Singapore, all those memories became so distant and blurred that I couldn’t tell if they were from a dream or from things that actually happened.
After 11 years living in the U.S., I’ve finally made my way back to the place I considered my childhood home. However, although a few of my friends were still in Singapore, everything had changed so much that nothing was the same. It’s strange to go back to a place you remember so clearly and yet not recognize anything. I was so relieved when my best friend (the first friend I made in Grade 1!) brought me to her place and I found out that she still lived at the same apartment complex she lived in when we were kids; all of the old memories came flooding back! The pool we used to play in religiously was still there (although, I remember it being bigger), and all of the sidewalks we roller bladed on hadn’t changed. Seeing her parents was really such a joy too; for years I considered her mother to be my second mom, and I used to practically live at her house.
Besides spending as much time as possible with my old friend and her family, one of the things I really wanted to do while in Singapore is revisit my old elementary school. A large portion of what I remembered were set in the playground and classrooms of the International School of Singapore, and I really wanted to see if it too had changed as much. When I took the MRT (subway) to Orchard station and walked up the road to the school, I was overwhelmed with emotion. The sidewalk had the same crooked cracks in them and, when I walked up the corner and the school came into view, all of the little kids were running around, just like I used to do. They were wearing the same uniforms, white shirt with dark purple shorts, with big I-S-S letters printed on the back of their shirts. Everything flooded back and, to be honest, I started to cry. I became this blubbering lady in the hallway, with little kids walking past me and staring.
With the exception of the cover, the paintings on the ground, and some of the toys, everything was exactly the same.
I waited until all of the kids went back into the classrooms before I wandered onto the playground; I was astonished at how small it looked. With the way I used to sprint across the blacktop, the whole playground seemed gigantic to me. Now, it took me not even a minute to walk from one end to the other.
After my time at my elementary school, I also made my way to the ISS high school campus. While I spent Grade 2-4 at this campus, the ISS high school campus used to include the elementary school, and I spent my first year there. I met my best friend Ambreen in Grade 1, and that was where my memories of Singapore really started to take hold. Because I had only spent one year there when I was six years old, I could only remember the very very large and loooong staircase leading up the hill to campus (it took my little legs forever to climb them), my first grade classroom, and the small terrace I used to play in during recess. My brother attended high school there, so I’m sure he must remember a lot more about the school than I do.
The long staircase up the hill
This is the terrace where, in Grade 1, while I was flying a paper kite I had made, I fell and scraped my upper lip. I still have the scar from it.
Today is my last full day in Singapore and, once again, time has flown by much too quickly. I’m really sad to be leaving again, but I know it won’t take another 11 years for me to come back. Although I have half of my Southeast Asian trip left to go, I already know that my time spent here will be my favorite. It was such an important part of my early life that after I left I felt like there were some questions left unanswered. What if I had never moved from Singapore to the states? What would everything have been like? By coming here, I have been able to finally close some old chapters and get the answers I needed to start some new ones. I graduate next June, and I can’t wait to see what new wonderful chapters may open.
Best friends since first grade
ISS International School, Elementary class from 1994-1998
