6 months of Living the Taiwan Dream

It's now been 6 months since I arrived here in Taipei and I still really love my life here. The scorching summer heat and humidity has subsided and the September weather was delightfully pleasant. Its great to be able to go for a stroll without getting so sweaty that it feels I've gone for a swim.

My work load has been pretty good lately as I have picked up a few more evening hours teaching adults in addition to weekly make-up classes for my elementary students. The magazine acting work continues supply supplementary income.


A Dutch friend of mine whom I had met on my first visit to Taipei was in town for a week long holiday. This gave me an opportunity to do a little bit of sightseeing and cross-off Yangming Mountain National Park from my list of things-to-see in Taipei.

The park, which spans a vast area covering several mountains/extinct-volcanoes, provided a nice setting to check out some of Taiwan's beautiful natural scenery including bubbling geysers, hot-springs and waterfalls.

In the past couple-weeks I also visited the National Taiwan Museum. At a price of only NT$10(33¢ CAD), it's a bargain, but the general lack of English-language information made it difficult to enjoy. Additionally, I was annoyed by their choice to place polar bears and penguins side-by-side, furthering the misconception that they share a habitat. The museum did, however, have a great dinosaur exhibit which nearly made-up for the carelessness.

I also decided to visit one of Taipei's more obscure museums, the Museum of Drinking Water. The museum is centered around a water pumping and purification system built during the Japanese colonial period. The system is housed in a grandiose building of which the architecture makes for the most interesting sight of the museum tour. It's interesting that, while water purification has been undertaken here for nearly a century, the tap-water in most Taipei homes is still considered unsafe to drink.

This past weekend was the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節), a holiday which loosely coincides with the Autumnal Equinox.  Traditional celebrations usually include feasting with family followed by a dessert of delicious moon-cakes.  In Taiwan, a somewhat less traditional practice, barbecuing, is the standard celebration for most families.   My own celebrations were limited to a a moon-cake or two, however, I did receive a box of pineapple cakes as a gift from one of my students.  This is actually the third time I have been in a celebrating country during this festival (I was in Vietnam in 2009 and China last year). 

 
With 6 months of Taiwan living under belt, I can't help but wonder where I will be and what I'll be doing in another half-a-year.  It has long been a goal of mine to live in a foreign country for more than 6 months and now that that has been achieved who knows what's next?  For now, I'm just enjoying my lifestyle here which has, for the first time in a long-while for me, settled into comfortable normalcy.