I’m still exceptionally sad after having returned from dream world a little sooner than I wanted to. At least I have more media to remind me of it all — a new episode of the Taiwanology podcast came out this week (a good listen and only once a month as of late) and I still haven’t finished Wu Li-pei’s memoir.
I have the next few months to fill with whatever it is that I can find to do.
I’m a big proponent for traveling as number one mental stimulation — there’s no better way to learn — and the phrase “being a tourist in your own city” keeps ringing through my head, so this summer, since I have a reasonably-paying job and some additional time now, I figured I could start journeying outward and trying to see things.
Plus, that’ll make excellent blog content, and that’s where my priorities lie. Truly, I’ll always do it for the views/reads.
So, I think in the next few months, I’m going to want to see whatever it is that’s within a day-trip distance from where I live in Rochester, NY. I think the most obvious thing to do is to go to Toronto at some point — I mean, that must be an interesting city and it’s only about a three-hour drive from here — so you’ll probably see that at some point.
I also got addicted to riding trains during my eight days abroad (between the 捷運 and the 高鐵) and I think it only remains for me to see how the trodden-down American and Canadian rail systems compare to the ones that are now my benchmark.
It’s clean, it’s fast, the ads are kind of adorable, and the Metro Taipei company licensed Shiba Says to make all of their public service announcements, which is definitely adorable. I mean, don’t you just want to ride that?
Anyway, in Toronto, I heard there was a 海底撈 on Yonge St., and I need to get some friends to go to there with me so we can get hot pot. Or, even better:
I’m incredibly food-motivated. I’m now going to go insane if I don’t find a solid method for obtaining scallion pancakes and soup dumplings in North America. Even better if I can bring my scallion pancakes and soup dumplings on to a train.
So, if I want to itemize my goals, I can write:
- Make friends
- Go places
- Eat food
- When I go places, do it on a train (because trains are cool).
And then maybe
- Travel in my mind with the power of reading (using physical books once I have money so I can stop buying region-locked epubs with my Kindle).
I want to be one of those cool kids with a full bookshelf.
Recently, as soon as I got back from Taiwan, I met up with a professor I had started contacting while I was still there (because the professor who was with us in Taiwan gave me her contact). She had also traveled to Taiwan last year and is apparently famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, so I was honored to get some conversational time with her in her office while we shared our love of Kuai Kuai, convenience stores, and people whose nice stereotypes are mostly actually true (Taiwan: the Canada of the East).
And, also, she had a contact with a professor at 國立清華大學 National Tsing Hua University who was looking for a lab assistant from the United States.
Anyway, not only did she have a bag of 乖乖 sitting behind her desk, but she also had stacks and piles of books, with a full bookshelf overhead to boot. Overall, I was impressed. And, we wave to each other walking by in the hallway now. Truly, this is the power of networking.
I’m getting better at keeping track of my connections and potential future career threads, and I’m starting to find the ability to pull more of them over time. I’m still looking for fall employment, but at least I have some better career skills now (although that doesn’t stop today’s job market from being absolutely abysmal).
If you haven’t guessed it by now, I still have more than enough pictures from Taiwan to fill any post and guide any discussion. While we were company-shadowing last Wednesday, we went to a public coworking space on Xinyi Rd., and this neat little wood bear was in there. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I could intern in Taipei — that and that when we toured the Songyan Cultural and Creative Park later that day, they showed a neat compilation of the morning routine of an intern at Songyan.
Sometimes, I just wish I hadn’t chosen engineering as a career path so that I could move to Taipei and intern at an artistic park. I mean, that’s just cool. Songyan was probably one of my favorite places to visit in Taipei, especially because of its lack of touristiness (none of the staff, except for our tour guide, spoke English, but the tour guide was pretty cool and had that funny accent of an old Taiwanese guy who definitely speaks fluent Japanese).
My LinkedIn banner is the unused south tobacco-plant room at Songyan, which still reeks of 菸草 and was more than an aesthetic. Something that surprisingly seems to really belong at an artistic park (unlike all of the anime cutout people that were around in the visiting-artist section of the park, not to mention the entire Windbreaker merchandise store in the back corner of the main building).
That room was neat, but this decorated window just nearby was even more so:
I really hope not too many fellow 外國人 figure out that this place exists, because neat historical and creative landmarks like this are what I travel for.
I know that these cultural, historical, and artistic parks are something that Taiwan is somewhat well-known for, because I know that there’s another one in Chiayi — I heard of it just before visiting — and I even saw the building during the taxi ride back to the 高鐵 station.
I didn’t go, though, and I’ve heard Chiayi’s is pretty underwhelming — I know there must be more in other major cities, though, like Taichung and Kaohsiung, both of which I plan to visit beyond by couple of brief stops in the 台中高鐵站 on our ways between Taipei and Chiayi last week.
And, there have got to be some similar landmarks around here, too. I’d love to assemble a list of landmarks to visit in Toronto, so that once I get there (potentially during an upcoming long weekend) I can stay for a few days and have time to ride the train to and from there. The tickets (and traveling overall) are kind of pricey, though (not any more so than the gas it would take to drive, there, though) so I’m going to have to wait a few more paydays so that I can be prepared for that kind of thing. I’d definitely love to report back on my findings.
So, anyway, these are the thoughts that have been floating around in my lonely nugget for the past many jet-lagged days of severe allergies and slight confusion as to what my new job entails. I’m still not officially cleared to work yet, but I’ve been hanging out with the team during their work days and trying to help just to get a feel for what’s going on.
I’ll be back soon with a little bit more to say, I hope. Time is what you make it, right?
I’ll send a picture of my epic bookshelf once it’s full.
拜拜！