Aug I, Week 2: Jumping into Chiayi

Hello again, dear reader! This year, I'm placed in Chiayi County on the main island of Taiwan, and I'll be serving as an ETF (English Teaching Fellow). As a quick note, I'll be writing biweekly blog posts this year (as opposed to last year's weekly ones). For this particular post, I'll only be writing about week 2 (admittedly, only half of week 2) since I arrived a week late, but the other posts will include two weeks in one post. Thank you for being patient!

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As with last year, this year, I had to wake up incredibly early to make it to my flight from PHL to SFO. Last year, I had the luxury of waking up at 4:30am, but this year, I had the delight of waking up at 3am instead. After wishing my family goodbye, I somehow made it through the nineteen hours of flights (and five-ish hours of layover) as I slogged from PHL to SFO to TPE. Some things I recognized, like the flight number and departure gate of the SFO-TPE plane, which were the same as last year. Some things I didn't, like what I looked like in a mirror after the entire ordeal.

Honestly, I hated it. The constant nausea, sleep deprivation, hunger, general sensory hell—it felt like too much. The entire time I was in the air, I wished I was home. And this time, home felt like more than just the US: home felt like either the US or Kinmen. But this time, sadly, I wouldn't be going to either. I'd be going to Chiayi.

On Wednesday (August 9th), I woke up in a hotel in Taoyuan and managed to haul myself to the HSR (High Speed Rail) station so I could get to Chiayi. The train ride was pleasant enough, and I made it to the apartment in one piece. As tired as I was, the real joy of the day wasn't managing to put my stuff down after so much transit, but rather seeing other ETFs.

It was wonderful to see familiar faces after spending so long zoning out in transit and feeling weirdly out of place in the US! In addition to one Kinmen ETA from last year, the other senior ETFs are ETAs from Changhua, Yilan, and Chiayi. Most of the day was spent chatting, which was nice. I liked getting to get to know some of the others I hadn't talked to as much last year. Besides fighting jet lag while watching Enola Holmes 2 with two of the other ETFs, I felt pretty good. No nausea yet.

The next day was my first time meeting the ETAs and the Chiayi coordinators. I spent the morning finishing a fun book one of last year's Little K ETAs got me, then I caught a ride to the day's workshop with another Chiayi ETF. I spent the day making origami and chatting with the other Chiayi cohort members, which was nice. I'm still settling in a bit, but I had a good time talking to everyone.

Afterwards, I went with another ETF to buy a new helmet, went to scooter practice, then had a quick group dinner. The evening's big event was going to (re)watch Barbie with the rest of the cohort, which was fun, of course. If only my job were also just beach.

Friday was roughly the same: workshop, scooter practice, and a group dinner. This time, we had pho for dinner, and we ate with one of our Fulbright advisors (who was a Chiayi ETA last year, actually). It was a pretty good time. I chatted with the rest of the cohort some more, and I also found a linguistics friend! Finally!! Then, we got douhua, and I went to one of the city apartments to play card games and vibe with everyone.

Photo credits for BeReal (right) to Brittany Chen, 2023.

On Saturday, I spent most of the day working on my laptop. One of the joys of the apartment I've been temporarily housed in is that there's no wifi. And the reception is terrible. Another ETF and I hung out at Starbucks doing work, then eventually headed into the city for a cohort dinner and KTV.

At the KTV place, I'm not sure how, but we managed to fit thirteen people in an elevator. Our four-ish hours of KTV were spent singing a mix of Taiwanese songs, nostalgia pop from the '10s, and other songs. Some of the night's most notable songs included some Britney Spears songs and some Jay Chou songs.

I didn't end up doing much on Sunday. I ran some errands, then read some of the Chinese book I bought last year. There's certainly lots of vocabulary in there I still don't know, but I'm still surprised how much I can read. Hopefully, my Mandarin improves enough over the year for me to read it with fewer annotations.

The rest of the day was pretty rainy, but it passed without major event. Later that evening, I went to a local restaurant with some other ETFs, then got ice cream.

I'm still settling in, but I'm looking forward to what the year here in Chiayi brings. Everyone seems nice; I just don't know them very well yet. It feels a little weird to talk about last grant period and the Kinmen cohort as belonging to "last year" when "last year" was, in fact, two months ago. In some ways, it feels like part of me is mourning the end of it. I still miss the cohort, my school, and the site.

I think having other ETFs, especially one that was in Kinmen with me last year, has helped me transition a bit more easily than last year. It feels nice to have some familiar faces around as well as people to talk to that get how weird the transition's felt. Part of me keeps expecting to turn around and see my old cohort in addition to the new one, but they're (mostly) back in the US now, and that chapter of my life is over now.

I'm sure Chiayi'll feel like home too in due time, but for now, it feels like I'm just a visitor. I'm also getting used to the amount of Taiyu that people speak here and what it's like to scoot in Chiayi City. City scooting is much scarier than I'd thought: much, much scarier. There's a ton of hook turns, one way streets that aren't really one way streets, and clusters of roads that merge at odd angles (oh my!). At the very least, there's still that cool statue of a chimpanzee playing the saxophone on the road between Chiayi City and the countryside, so I guess it's okay.

Fingers crossed the year goes well!

Writer's Note: This post was originally written on Saturday, August 12th, 2023.