A group of Missouri S&T students are in Taiwan this summer for a research project. Here's the latest on their journey from Jamie Statler.
So I’ve heard it said that every plan has to have its glitch, and I think our trip has already had its share, just from the travel to get here in Taiwan. First, Angela has a ridiculously turbulent flight from KC to Detroit, while Isaac, Dr. Huang, and myself decided that we had a new pilot for our flight from St. Louis, judging from the weaving on the runway at takeoff, and the bouncing on landing. If that had been all, it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. But after that, our flight out of Detroit was delayed for three and a half hours due to a broken plane. We are all boarded, head out to the runway, accelerate… and stop. Some light is apparently going off, so the pilot tells us we are going to try again, see if it was just a computer malfunction. Such a reassuring turn of phrase when dealing with air travel, wouldn’t you agree? Well, it happens again, so once more we just accelerate down the runway only to stop and head back to the terminal. After holding us on the plane for an hour while they try to fix the problem, but they end up making us deboard and move to a new plane. Which we have to wait another hour to board. This one at least works the first time, and we finally take off. Oh, and I’m being blamed for the glitch, seeing as the same thing happened to me when I traveled to China a few years ago.
And that’s not even all of it. The first meal is served after about an hour, and we have a choice of a chicken or beef meal. Well, there is a certain elderly Japanese man on board who becomes rather irate when he learns the beef meal has run out before he gets one. The communication that followed between him and the stewardesses is rather entertaining, seeing as he’s yelling at them in Japanese, and these particular stewardesses were not of the few who were multilingual. There were threats made to land the plane in Anchorage, where he could get his beef meal, courtesy of the local jail. The translator was finally brought down from wherever she was on the plane, and another woman who I think may have been a relative, and calmed him down enough that the detour through Alaska wasn’t necessary.Thankfully, that was the end of it. The connection in Japan went smoothly, and we arrived in Taiwan a mere two hours late (although it took another two to get out of the airport and make it to the apartment where we would be staying). So, we ended up traveling between 28 and 30 hours, and completely skipped Tuesday. We woke up between 5 and 7 on Monday morning (CDT), and arrived at the apartment around 2 AM Wednesday morning (Taiwan time), and promptly went to bed, even though it should have felt like lunchtime. Taiwan is 13 hours ahead of Missouri, so we woke up Wednesday morning around the time all of you back home were finishing up dinner on Tuesday.
We toured around Taipei Wednesday and Thursday, courtesy of Chuan-Chin (one of Dr. Huang’s graduate students, who also happens to be from Taiwan, and is home for a visit). We visited the National Palace Museum, which is a collection of historic objects one of Taiwan’s early leaders had brought over from mainland China. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures, so we can’t share with you the amazing intricacy and detail on a majority of these pieces. There were magnifying glasses positioned at several of the displays in order to fully see some of the details. We also visited the memorials for Taiwan’s first two presidents.
I didn’t know this, but Taiwan is home to the world’s tallest building (unless it’s been surpassed since its completion in 2004), and the view from the 88th floor observation deck of Building 101 (named for its 101 floors) is quite amazing. All of the city can be seen, and all of the mountains surrounding it. Hopefully I can get some pictures posted soon.
We traveled to Hualien on Friday morning by train, and got our first views of National Dong Hwa University. Angela remarked on the presence of the Engineering Building as we drove through the campus. Building. As in one. Very odd for us Missouri S&T students. We met the members of the lab, but I couldn’t tell you their names yet. Not only are there twelve of them, but only some of them have English names, and the Chinese names are hard enough to pronounce, let alone remember. I think I remember about half, but maybe not, we’ll see what happens when I see them again wearing different clothing. We didn’t have to do anything in the lab yesterday, and we got today to ourselves. Tomorrow the students will be taking us out to show us around Hualien some.
We are set up in very nice apartments on the campus, one for Angela and me, and one for Isaac. Unfortunately, the apartment Angela and I are in is too far away from the wireless router in the building (since the one on our floor apparently doesn’t work), which is already proving difficult, since like any good Missouri S&T student, we are completely dependent on our access to the internet for survival. The campus here is many times larger than Missouri S&T so thankfully, we???ve been provided bikes to get around. There is a 7-11 on the campus (as there was on every third block in Taipei), and a couple restaurants as well, and at least one good one just outside the campus. The food has all been delicious. Unfortunately, none of the restaurants have picture or English menus, and the workers don???t speak English, so we???ve had to have the students translate and tell us what to order. I???m looking forward to dinner tonight; we won’t have the students with us to translate. I never before realized how difficult it is to communicate with someone who shares no verbal language with you.
Well, I think that is quite enough verbiage for now. I hope to post frequently, and so hope to post shorter posts as well.
Wishing to everyone that their weather is less humid than ours,
Jamie
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